OK32: How to Rebuild an SDR Team: From $200K to $600K in pipeline a Week With the Same Four Reps with Will Rohleder, SDR Director at TeachTown

Smile and dial. Don't think too hard about who you are calling. Just dial more of them. That's how most SDR teams still run. In 2026, this SDR director took over a team that run exactly that way. Four reps, no manager, just $200,000 in pipeline. After four months he threw out the playbook and a month later the same four reps were bringing in about 600,000 a week. His name is Will Rolleder. He runs that team now 14 SD arts at 88% conversion to opportunity pipeline. He works at each town special education software for school district. In this episode Will break down the system that replaced smiling down how he builds territories, his show rate playbook, why he pays SDRs to move this forward instead of just booking the meeting and who he hires. Enjoy the episode. Okay, so everyone, thanks for joining. Today I have Will joining us. We are going to have a session on his system. I'm going to give some context around why I have Will specifically. So we are part of a community called the SDR Leaders of USA and he was asking questions about the first one was the show rate that they have at Stitch on actually it's above 90% and he was asking about is it good? Can we do more? And then the conversation was really long. I think there are like 30 messages something else. So the conversation is really long and I think Will was talking a lot about different things they are doing about the metrics they have. Will, thank you for joining us. Could you yeah, give us if I can you introduce yourself really quickly and then we can, we can start. Yeah, thanks for having me. So Will Rolleder, I am the SDR director at Teachtown and I've been at Teachtown a little over two years. I started in March of 2024. Okay. When we were preparing this, you told me that you think those numbers that you have right now with your team are basically your experience at working at four different companies on the Asia leadership team. So it's experience obviously, but can you give us some background about how basically everything not maybe everything you learned but how did you come up to Teachtown and what the stuff you're doing at Teacher? I'll skip a couple probably more boring jobs. I was a full sales cycle rep for a commercial insurance company. So literally ground up of cold calling all the way to closing and managing the book of business. That was pretty eye openening and a lot of aspects in terms of like what is beneficial outreach and then how do you find the right prospects and clients and close them which I think in turn goes with my first job as an STR was at a company called jellyvision. It was not what I would call a personalized approach or unique market. It was selling a add on to HR Systems. So any company over 50 people was a prospect. That's a, that's a lot of companies. So very much was like a smile and dial. Don't necessarily pay attention to who you're calling, just call them. After that I left Jellyvision. I went to a company called Backstop. I was in the SDR role for five months before I became a team lead. And then two months after that I was the SDR manager. I was the third SDR ever hired there. So I kind of built it as an sdr, managed there for a little over a year. Went to a company called Insta Work. That was another smile and dial where Backstop was very unique. It was, I forgot to mention it was Fintech, but it was venture capital, hedge funds only businesses that managed a billion dollars or more in assets. There's not more than 10,000 of those. There's roughly 4 to 5,000 when I was working there. So unique. You had to be very personalized. And then went to a company called Multiplier, another HR software company, Smile and Dial. Now I'm at Teachtown. What we do is we sell special education software which includes curriculum, IEP tracking, a lot of other very special education specific things. But you only have school districts. So again, back to a finite number. Very unique market, very unique icp. And that's kind of a very high level overview of how I got to teach now. Okay, so you talk a lot about Smilendahl, which I think today we're not going to talk about that specifically. We're going to unpack the stuff you've been doing with your team. Let's talk about when you, you joined Teach down, when you took over the team. How many SDRs did you have on the team? Because right now I think you have 14 SDRs. So what was the, the, the, the state when you joined Teachtown? When I joined, like I said, it was March of 24. They had hired four SDRs without a manager between November and December of 23. From December of 23 to March of 24, they had only built 200K, a pipeline and, and no direction reaching out to multiple states all over the place. Like not a whole lot of guidance. So I came in and actually introduced a system. The first thing I did was I shrunk everybody's territory from either one state to three states depending on what states they were. I introduced how we're going to all start to work out of one. Well, we use Gong engage, so one flow or sequence or cadence, whatever you want to call it, but one actual form of outreach where it's more standardized rather than everybody doing their own thing. We got messaging on track and I aligned SDRs to AES where before they just supported every AE across the organization, which for four SDRs and roughly I want to say at the time it was 18 AES was not very sustainable and which is why they were really struggling. So I joined in March. By April we were now starting to do 600k in pipeline a week just with those same 4 SDRs of maybe a month turnaround of the systems I implemented. What did you see? So basically they could go prospect the full us and then you started to implement some specific territories, the highest for the best territories. Basically in the education world there's certain states where generally they have more money to spend, but not only that, they have more. They have a higher student population. For us in special education, the breakdown is roughly 3 to 5% of your entire enrollment in a school district is the moderate to severe population for disabilities, which is what we service. We looked at the higher densely populated states. Your New York, your Texas, your California, those were a three first target. Cool. How can I cover those? Sweet. After we cover those, what states do we generally have a higher wind percentage and how can we throw more fuel on the fire? Your, your Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois sort of states as well. So like that's what we determined is where are highest need states, where are we getting the most dollars from? And we're going to start there first. As the team will grow, we'll then work our way down that list until we have your priority states covered. No offense to Nebraska, but there's not a whole lot there other than corn. So like just not a priority, which is why we don't really focus on it. So you were talking about the 4 year SDRs for 18 AES. So what did you change? You have like a pairing, maybe not a pair because with 4 SDRs and 18 AES, but did you have like 1 SDR working with 4 or 5As, or what was the. Yeah, that's. It's a great question. So when I started with the state approach, it was how many AES are in that state? So at the time we had two AES in Texas. That one SDR that was working in Texas, because it's so big, it's such a massive state for us, 1 SDR 2 AES, CA was 3, 1 SDR, 3 AES. Then when I was looking at like New York, it was 1 AE. So I added on Pennsylvania, one other AE. I prefer a 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 approach. I think it limits the 1 on ones that they have to do. I think it also narrows their scope and they have a very clear path forward. Also generally that AE in the same territory like the two in Texas, they're kind of on the same page of what works. So you're doing the same thing with those AES. You're not doing completely different strategies for two different people. Now let's talk about more numbers. So I know for you on the thread and to give the feedback for the one joining because some people join after we are talking about some metrics. So show rate, you have a 92.7% and you are aiming for 95% conversion to opportunity, 88% and pushing to 90%. Could you talk about that specifically? Do you want to start with the show rate? I think as someone who was a past SDR hated if I booked a meeting and they didn't show up. I'm sure everyone does like it. It always was a personally pissed me off. It felt like a slight against me as a person. So some of the things that we implement is while I'll start with cold call, I think email is different. But if you're getting a meeting via cold call, the biggest thing I push on and it is not about us. The sdr, the organization is all about the prospect. So I think what really attributes to our show rate is all we do is we try to talk about them. We very much try to talk about like what is your pain? What is going on? And then how can our solution help to solve that and tie it back. But I like the metric of like 70%. They're talking 30% US as we're talking through it and we're getting them to kind of buy in. In an ideal world, they're going, man, it sounds like you, you could solve our problem. I want a meeting. And they ask for it. We do get that to happen, which I'm always excited to hear about. But as we're going through and we're booking the meeting, we're always recapping like, hey, I know we're going to meet two days from now at this time. I heard that XYZ is a problem. Here's how this part of our solution will solve for it. This part, X, Y, Z is also a problem. This is how we can help with this and we're recapping in that While they're on the phone, I always ask my team, while you're recapping, hey, I'm going to send you a blank calendar invite and what I would appreciate is if you could accept it, I will fill it out with the zoom link. I'll fill it out with the agenda, I'll add on my product specialist. But can you just hit it that way? I know I hit your inbox nine times out of ten. Which goes with our show rate. When they hit accept, they're always showing up. They're like, yep, I saw it. Most of the time if they're not hitting accepted, like, we don't have it. And then it's, you know, okay, well did it go to your spam folder? We're doing that sort of rhythm and roll or they just go, nope, I don't know, I don't see it. Well, I gotta go. And they weren't a real prospect or they weren't going to show up to begin with if that ends up happening most of the time. But via phone call, that's what we start with. We use Google. I like the 10 minute before notification. I also like the you can add another notification for a day before that has been super helpful where we get people like, hey, thank you for the reminder. I actually have to reschedule. Can we do that now? Like, it does help with. If anyone is going to reschedule in our show. How can we get ahead of that as quick as possible? We do have some reps who will send an email 24 hours before and call. They'll call. Be like, hey, Eric, just wanted to make sure that you're still available for this. Cool. You are sweet. See you tomorrow. Like, and pretty quick follow up there. So it, it kind of sounds like a lot, I think, but I would rather you put in all the effort to get the right person and have them show up than not. Part of our, our show rate I think as well is how well we attack our icp. We're very like, we know exactly who we need to call. Like if I call a gen ed PE teacher, they're not going to show up. Why do they care about special education? Like, that's not going to happen at all. So like us knowing we need the special education director, the special education coordinator, assistant superintendent to special education. Like, those are the right people and these are things that we can solve for. So really getting your ICP correct has been huge as well. Yes, that's it. No, that's A good point, because most of the time when you stop checking the quality of the meetings, you can see really quickly if it's an acp. Sometimes that's the reason why the not sure rate is higher for those meetings. Something I didn't ask you. The first meeting, is it the SDR call or is it the first call with the ae or what's the process for you? So the call that they're setting up next, I like every SDR to be on the call, but they don't have to be. Generally it is like the AE is the one running the show. I want my SDRs to be in lockstep with their AES. I want them to hear what AES are saying on the call and what prospects are saying. Especially since it is so regional base of working with this district. What about the school district literally next door, are they having similar issues? So I push for SDRs to have a bigger role in it, ask questions as well if the AE is good with it and be a part of the actual discovery process. But otherwise it's mostly the AES. Do you ever saw a handoff like you say on the phone, the interface you said that you are going to put them in touch with a product specialist, but do you send like an email or so to introduce the account executive? We'll do a couple of things on the handoff. If it's a call, we'll send the gong recording to them. We fill out band like hey, here's everything I have. You can also go back and listen to the call. If it's an email thread one I should go back. We don't just like say oh cool, you said yes to a meeting. We do go back and try to qualify as well. Like how many students do you have? What are you currently using? Stuff like that to really hone in on what is going on via email. If they say yes, but we forward that entire thread to the the product specialist. But to answer your question, yeah we do a like hey this is. I'm going to pick on Melvin because I see his name in the chat like hey this is Melvin, my product specialist. And you know, really looking forward to talking to you about XYZ XYZ and how we can solve like we'll recap again in that production email. It's really interesting here because recently I shared like a newsletter about this topic, the show specifically and the first thing I'm seeing mainly on calls. It's a reason to be on the call for the prospect. Most of the time the SDR push for the meeting and the prospect. They don't have any reason to be on the call. So yes, maybe they're curious, but they didn't, for example, confirm. Not maybe confirm, but we couldn't find any problems mentioned by the prospect of the call. And here sounds like you are really trying to unpack some problems and then if it makes sense, move forward to another conversation. Which here it's oh, okay, you are saying that you can help me. So, okay, and I have this problem and maybe you can help me with that. So it makes sense for them to be on the call every time. The first time I'm seeing on calls, they are pushing for the meeting, but they have no reason to be on the call. So I think this specifically here, and we are not talking about reminders and we are, it's mainly the. If you think about the buyer journey, it's one reason for them to be on the call. We do a ton of research prior to reaching out. Probably one of the biggest things I am a proponent of is you should go into your call with some sort of intent of like, hey, I done research on your district and maybe even you as a, as a prospect, depending on your title in the school district. But I know it's a very unique market. But for us, like every school district has to have a strategic plan. What is your plan for next three to five years to improve things? We look that up. You do a quick use of AI Gemini, whatever you go, hey, summarize this and how it relates to special education. We find that and then we'll send emails around it. We'll make cold calls around that. And at least that's a jumping off point for us. And you are talking about calls. Do you do something differently for via email or do you use LinkedIn? Or maybe not, because I don't think it's any. Just super active on LinkedIn. Yeah, we, we use LinkedIn generally. The education space isn't very heavy on LinkedIn. I mean, we still use it. We, we give it a shot. I have one SDR who recently has had three meetings set over the last month, and that's three more than we've had in the previous two years. Like, I, I don't know what she's doing differently. We're trying to unpack that just with the fact that she's gotten three. But hey, I'll take it our emails are a little bit more scripted, I would say, in terms of like, I found this. Is this still an issue? Is it still priority where the calls can be A bit more flexible of like hey, reinstancing plan. Is that a top concern for you or what is a fire that is going on right now in your department and what is your plan to solve for it? If we can talk about what is the issue right now, nine times out of 10 they're also more interested in fixing that right now because that's the biggest pain point and their long term strategic plan is still something we can also solve for. Do you see a difference in terms of show rates between emails and calls? It's similar for you. It's. It's roughly the same emails. I would say probably actually a little bit higher. Generally we're probably closer to like 95% and actually showing a 91ish, maybe 90 for phone calls. We do set about 95% of all meetings over the phone. So 95 to 60% via phone and then 35 to 40% via email. So that's where a little bit of discrepancy comes into. Now I would love to focus more about the conversion rate from first meeting to opportunity. You are talking about Bent. Do you use Bent with your team? Also the A team is using Bent or do they use something different like Medpic or Medic or what's the. Let's unpack your methodology on this. Yeah, the biggest thing that we focus on in the SDR team because we do use Bant as an organization. The biggest thing that the SDRs focus on is authority and need. Time is somewhat important, but it isn't the biggest thing that I have them focus on. If you can get a. Hey, like we're really interested in doing this for the next school year. Cool. Time frame is pretty short. Let's get to it. If it's well, maybe we do it for 2027, but we won't do it for the first semester. Okay. We have some more like we'll, we'll get if we can truly the need and the pain is what's going on is our biggest thing. And then we know our icp. We know if we have a SPED director, they do have authority. They will be the person pushing it forward. So we do know the authority before we're going into the call. What do you use from Bent? Do you connect Bent to the compensation plan or is it your composition plan based on the stage of the opportunity? Or could you, could you explain what's your complaint first and then how it's connected to your process? Yeah, I think a big reason also this goes back into the conversion rate of why our conversion rate is so high is because 50% of the SDR's comp plan is tied to the. The opportunity gets open and then that opportunity makes it further along into stage three. If it doesn't make it to stage three, they're missing on 50% of their comp. So like with us having a that tied into it, like, yes, the bant is obviously important, but if they set up a discovery call, okay, you get paid on a discovery call and someone's showing up, but you're missing out on the other half of your account because there's no opportunity to open. So they're very driven of getting feedback from their AES of like, okay, I thought I had the spud director, I thought it was the right person and what do I do from here? Like, how can I help us get Pipeline out of it and get an opportunity out of it? And then they go back, maybe it's I need a superintendent. Maybe we didn't hone in on what the pain was enough. Maybe they also want coordinators involved. Like, you know, what is it? Do we go back to the same person or we go back to others and they still only get paid on the one discovery call, even if they set up a second one. Like, I'm not going to pay them twice on it. But they're really driven to get an opportunity and to get that opportunity to move forward. So even after the discovery, they're trying to set demos. After the demo, they're trying to do follow up of like, hey, do we need to do another demo? Do we need to set up anything else with anyone else on your team? What can I, as an SDR help to drive this deal forward for my ae? Or is the AE handling it and I just get paid on it moving forward because I set up a meeting who owns the decision about what moved through an opportunity stage. Is it specific enough to say, okay, is it moving to the opportunity stage or is it based on the AE saying this is qualified or not qualified? For example, I'm saying that because recently I seen on LinkedIn an AE talking about why an opportunity is qualified or not qualified for the SDR is working with. And I said, you shouldn't make the decision. This should be black and white. It should be, okay, we have the right person on the call, they have a specific problem or specific need, for example, whatever methodology you are using. So normally it should be black and white. It's not like, oh yeah, I feel this is a good opportunity or a bad opportunity. No, a good opportunity is. And then you have specific Criteria. Do you use this for that or what's your process? Yeah, so the AE is the one who owns moving the stages. I don't allow SDRs to open opportunities. I took that permission away and so. Well, I didn't take it away. I asked our Salesforce admin to take it away. But like, hey, I don't want them having any opportunity to do so. In that qualification though, there are very clear guidelines. Must have the right person must have demoed. It's six different bullet points and if four are hit then based off of that the stage does get moved forward so the SDR can get paid. We have one question from Melvin actually. He's asking about compensation on close one. Do you have something on close one? Sorry, already? I think you told me. Not yet, but no, not yet. I did. At my fintech company they were paid 0.25% on anything that they sourced and went closed one. Those deals were in the 300 ish K to 4 million. So 0.25% was a nice little bump in the deal. Cycle was roughly 12 months long. It was a bit of an incentive because I kept losing SDRs to promotion there. So I was like, hey, if you do stick around for 12 months to 16, which is what I wanted everyone to do, good chance that at least something you source goes close one and you get a nice little bonus. I would like to do that at Teachtown. There's been some conversation around it would like to go back to half a percent, maybe a percent at most. But that is something we go back and forth on quite often. But I am pushing for it. Thanks Melvin for the question. We have another question from Vincent but it's another topic so I'm going to keep this one for the Q and A session at the end. Anything else on the comp plan? Our comp plan, I was able to actually lower it and it was because we had to set 36 meetings a quarter. I was only able to lower it by three. But I think it goes back to the quality of the meetings that we're setting. I found that if we go for quality over just the quantity, like yeah, that's there's some quantity there, but the more that we focus on quality, the higher op size it is, the bigger deal it is and the better set it traditionally has been. I would like to get it to 30. I think 30 is a good sweet spot for where we need to be at. But 33 was where we landed, so I'll take a little bit of a win there as well. I'M just a big proponent of like you don't need a A100 deals a quarter or 100 discos but if you have 30 high quality ones and our conversion rate stays at 90 or above then will hit hit our metrics especially based off of past performance on the team. So and when you lower for example the quarter and that's what you're mentioning here, do you change the expectations from your team or is it similar in terms of the quality? The quality has to stay the same. If the quality goes down then yeah, you gotta set more like that has to go up. I do expectations a bit different I think than I've done in other places. I know I mentioned I work at like smile and dial places. Like I think you can tell I'm not the biggest fan of that. Like that doesn't work for me as a. Just when I was in SDR I struggled with it but when it got personalized that's when I found success. If they're not taking their time finding good quality stuff then like hey comps going to go up. Like your quota is going to go up. On top of that when we shrunk their quota, the payout per meeting and per stage three opportunity that went up as well. So their OTE didn't shrink. Tried to make sure like hey, you're still coming out with roughly the same dollars but this is how we're going about in making sure that you're still doing just as well, if not even better with a smaller quota. Now I wanted to talk about the SDR AE relationship. So at the beginning we are talking about having one SDR for three AES and with the compensation plan you have also sounds like the SDRA relationship is really like it sounds like you have a lot of systems in place for them to collaborate. So yeah. Could you explain a few things they are doing together? You said that the first call the SDR they don't need to be on the call. But do you have any specific systems for them to help the AE to have the first meeting convert to an opportunity. I mean depending on their tenure as an SDR they might be more involved in the disco rather than just being a fly in the wall listening in. I require them to meet in a one on one at least once a week. Like it is very important especially with how strategic we need to be in these states. Like you gotta me and that one on one could be 15 minutes. Like you you determine what it is. But as long as there's a a true path forward and there's some strategy behind it. That's what I care about. I do have some SDRs who, and I will say they're generally my higher performing S years. They talk with their AE every day. Whether that just be like a slack of hey, got this response. What can I do here? Hey, saw this news article around funding. Should we change and maybe pivot to targeting this? You know, whatever it may be. The best SDRs that I have had have such a close relationship with their AES because they are in tune with what is going on in their territory to make sure that they're setting up good meetings and building quality opportunities. So from the, from the handoff in the disco, I think this is off part of your question. Like what are they doing to help set up that opportunity? I mean they also go back and like, hey Vincent, this is what I heard on the call that I set up for you. Like this is their pain, this is their pain. Like are we on the same page? Like this is what I think the dollar amount will be and I want the SDR in the exercise of if I were to open up an opportunity to put a dollar amount, this is what it would cost. And then ideally the AE is like, yep, you're spot on. Or oh, I also did did hear this. Which tells me maybe they need this part of our solution. Like I want them collabor and they do that where every once in a while an SDR will catch something in the AA is like, oh, I didn't even think of that. Like I didn't catch that cause I was so busy in the disco doing my job. I'm glad you were listening. Like, sweet, let's add that to our quote and let's come back with a game plan of how to demo that so that I think that answers your question. That's kind of how I'm having them be in the disco and be a part of it and not just sitting there listening. Granted, when they're more tenured, maybe not like, oh, this is my first meeting I'm going to sit in and I have no idea what to say. I'm just going to be on mute and watching my AE do their job sort of a thing. Do you have like one decision maker in the process on your industry or do you have like, do you need to multi thread and do you have your SDRs helping on this too? It's definitely a multi thread approach. So even if a spud director is the main point of contact that we go after and they're, they're a great person to go to. Generally, they have their coordinators and they might even have some teachers at the district join calls as well. Teachers being in the classroom of like, yeah, I would actually use this. Use this or no, this is just another tool. I wouldn't. The superintendent and the school board is also a big part. We do need them to sign off on things. So it's very multithreading. Basically where we have it right now, stop with the SDRs is just in the sped department. The AES will multithread into the superintendents and school board as well. But mostly the STRs are the ones focusing just on the spud department. Now let's talk about hiring. The result of the team is the impact of a lot of things. The system, the right people on the team, how you enable them, et cetera. So you mentioned that that's important for you on your team. So what have you done when you joined Teachtown in terms of hiring? Do you have a specific background you're looking for? Any soft skills that you are looking for for this industry? Tell me more. Teachtown is definitely different than pretty much every other place I've ever h. I almost exclusively only hired teachers. I have one person on my team who's never been in a classroom, but the other 13 have. And maybe they've been in the classroom and left for a couple years, but at least they have that experience. And I think that really comes across in the confidence of what it's like to have to have been sitting in it. So for me right now, one of the major things that you have to have is gotta be a teacher. For the previous places I've worked at like the fintech company, I'd like them to have some sort of financial background, but if they didn't, I could still coach that up. And we had materials and stuff to be able to speak to what goes on in hedge funds. But it's so hard to talk to a special education director. As someone who's never been in a special education classroom of like, yeah, I can really relate to how difficult that is. Like, no, you can't. You haven't been. That's completely different. You have no idea how to do that. You don't know what it's like if a kid is freaking out and trying to stab you with a pencil because they're having, you know, anger management issues. Like, you can't relate to that. The biggest thing I look for is I start with teachers. The second thing is, like, because I'm generally hiring teachers with no sales experience, I do have two that had sales experience. Cool. My favorite question to ask in the interview would be if you could sell me on a passion of yours. Like, what is your passion? And why should it be my new passion? Because I can't ask them to sell me their previous company that they worked at if they didn't sell anything. So if you were to sell me anything, like, sell me something to care about. I've had people sell me on yoga, on matcha lattes. Like, I don't care what it is, but the main thing for me, and I know you heard me say it before, is, like, ask questions and find pain. If someone comes in of, like, I don't have sales experience and I need to sell you something, the first thing I have to do is ask you a question like, well, what is your interest? Like, if, Eric, do you like to work out? Oh, cool. How often do you do it? Oh, what kind of workout is it? How physical are you? Well, you know, that's why you should join this gym that I enjoy going to. Like, I've had people use that exact same methodology of, hey, I'm going to ask questions and figure out more about you. Like, for me, that's kind of the make or break question that I have found of. Of what really matters. Like, that's someone who cares more about their prospect than their needs rather than just pushing something on them. And I think that's something you don't need to have a sales background to know. I think that's just something that people inherently know. Like, someone who's inherently curious. What's the behind the scene here for this question? So are you trying to see if they're curious the way they think about this or what's your. Yeah, I'm trying to really see how much they make it a conversation, not just, oh, I trapped someone in an elevator. I'm going to talk to them for 30 seconds. Like, I want it to be. I want it to be conversational. I want it to be that they care about what my responses are, not just, oh, I'm going to talk to you about how this gym has this or it has that, and, oh, we're open 247 and we never close and blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, I want it to be, oh, well, why do you enjoy that kind of workout? Why do you. Why do you go to the specific gym that you go to? What's your favorite thing? Like, oh, well, we have that. You know, like, I want it to be. I want it to be what? I like my cold Calls to be. And if I like don't have to coach, my favorite thing to tell my team is sometimes you gotta ask a question, then just shut up. And I think that helps them out, right? Like ask your prospect something. And that's what I want them to inherently come with if they can. Now I'm not expecting them to knock it out of the park by any means, but if they can at least come in with some level of curiosity, some level of questions, I can work with that and I can, you know, I could work around that. We have one question that actually so a second question from Vincent. So Vincent, if you want to unmute yourself and ask the question. Can you hear me? Yep, yep. Yeah, we can. Perfect. Hey Will, thank you first, first of all for all the insights. Yeah. So my question is, so if you hire new SDRs, what do you advise them to do in the first 30 days to succeed as much as possible? A bit of context. I have some STR experience and I'm just changing the company. Of course my perception would be to learn as much about the product and the problem the customers face. But do you have some other insights that I could apply or other people could apply? That's a great question. Part of the onboard plan that I have set up is every SDR is required for the first two weeks to. I have a buddy system so I already pre partner them with another more 10 year SDR. But they're required to for the first two weeks sit in three different sessions where the SDR is researching accounts and then writing personalized emails. Cool. Like what is the research process? How are you assign these accounts? How are you writing these emails? They will sit on zoom. They might talk the entire time. Maybe they'll be muted so they can focus whatever works for them. But they have to watch the person sharing their screen going through it. Most of the time they're not muted. They like narrate like, here's how I was assigned this account, here's how I'm researching. This is why I picked this particular thing to email around. So that's, that's like the email side of how are we researching how we're doing that? They're also required to do three. If you can squeeze in a fourth session of the same sort of thing sharing your screen, but it's on cold calls. So they'll sit there and listen because we are a fully remote company. As you can see, I'm sitting in a. Not an office obviously, but we know what's the best way. If you were sitting next to someone on the sales floor, how can you listen to their calls? What do they say? How are they going about it? Is it just yep, click call or is it call didn't connect with anyone. Going to take a second, going to read my notes, going to come in with a good intent on my next call. Cool. This is how I'm setting myself up. This is what I should do as an SDR because this SDR is very successful and will set me up with them. Awesome. That's the plan. I would say that's probably like the biggest thing that helps to ramp people up in the first 30 days. Thank you very much. Let me add also a few things. On top of this you are hiring former teachers which I think they already have some business acumen about what they are facing. So when you don't have this business acumen, actually one thing that I thought interesting to do is to listen to calls with customers and prospects so you can be more involved into the words they use. The problems I'm mentioning not just the materials that you have internally because I'm not saying all the materials are bad but most of the time the material is more like the marketing team that builds something and it's more fancy words to explain what the prospects are facing. So one thing is to listen customers or prospects, if you don't have a lot of recordings, you can look for the podcasts where you have your buyers where you can listen to this conversation. And same here, the goal is to just to listen what they are saying. What's the day to day of this person so you can increase this business acumen. Because product I think it's great to learn about the product but at the end you need to understand the world of the person and knowing your product. It's. I don't think it's enough to have a conversation with your own prospects. That's a huge part. I have an entire folder of sets that we've done over the phone from SDRs. That's actually another great point. I require them to come in and make a comment on every single one. Whether that be like I'm going to take this intro of how they approach this prospect and I'm going to do this in my next call role play and make it work for me. That's a like here's a great pain point question never heard of before. Love how Suzy did this. Going to use this for my next call. Like that's part of it as well. We have about 45 calls in a folder right now that I also require Them to listen to, I will say probably after about 30 of them might get a bit redundant. So they're like, hey, I didn't have any new notes, but obviously it was a great set. That's fine too. But I think listening to those, to your point, are very beneficial. And another thing also, you were talking about top performers earlier, something you should do also. It's. You should have conversation with top performers. But the other thing is shadow them. You need to see what they do. Because one thing that I've learned working with top performers on the teams I used to lead, sometimes they do stuff, but they don't know why. And you need to shadow them for that, to see the little things they are doing. Because top performers, they do a lot of little things that they are not able to explain. So you can ask them questions, but on top of it, shadow them. That's the shadowing of, like, the emails and phone calls and stuff. It's. It's huge. So helpful. Anything else on hiring that you want to share? I think some of it's probably what other people do in hiring. For me, it's very important that the person who I'm interviewing has questions as well. Like, yeah, I've had people who don't ask me anything. And I think if you don't ask anything, like, for me, that's a pretty. Pretty hard no from me. Like, I still need them to be curious. But yeah, I mean, I think just how they come in and address themselves, I think that's pretty important. Just the fact that it is teachers, it's very unique. It's unique for where I work. So I imagine. Thanks, Vincent, also for the question. Now let's talk about AI. So how do you use AI with your team, but also you personally? So we use AI never as a actual outreach tool. So I don't have any sort of AI sending emails. I am very against AI making phone calls. I've received some of those and they are by far some of the worst things I've ever heard of before. We use AI purely in our research and in our data. So I know I mentioned we use Gemini. We'll pull up a strategic plan from the district. We'll say, give us the synopsis. We'll pull YouTube videos of board meetings. That one's been very useful. And we'll say, hey, like, when did they talk about special education in this? And, you know, how does it pertain to how it can help sell Encore, which is our platform and because we fed it. What does Encore. What does Encore do? Blah Blah blah can go, hey, it sounds like this part and this part would be super beneficial. We pretty much strictly only use it for the research part. We'll use it for not only researching specific districts, but like which states might have certain legislation that's coming up, which states are generally doing better and investing more and more and pre K or special education and stuff like that. So I know I just keep reiterating the research side, but outside of that, like, AI isn't as heavy here as I think it might be in other places. Mostly because when we did have an AI inbound sdr, we used it for a month. That inbound SDR did things that we're not supposed to do, like we had a lawyer contact us and ask for a demo. So the AI decided to send it a recorded demo. We don't talk to lawyers. That's not something we're gonna do over here. But because it's an AI and it was easily tricked like it did, that we had it responding to people of like, yep, gonna set you up on the meeting, but doesn't qualify anything. Like we. We just had some issues with it on that side, which is why, okay, I'm generally against it for those sort of things, but fantastic when it comes to research and cutting down the hours there, especially with this personalized as I require my team to be. So it's been, it's been fantastic for that. I agree with you on that. For me, the AI specifically, it's the biggest lever and it's on the account research. It's so good at finding a lot of public information about the company that you can use for your outreach that before you could do it. But it's something super manual I could take depending on. If you don't set a limit, you could take 15, 20 minutes per account where he will vary basically it super quick to do that. We'll use it maybe to like kind of help us rewrite emails and then we'll go back and change it a little bit then too. But we almost never send out an email that was directly written from Gemini or ChatGPT or anything. Like, I know Gong Engage has its own AI email writing tool, but even in that we. We just do it to like reword things for the most part. Yeah. The issue that I have with tools like this, most of the time it's what you give to the tool basically. If the input the country search is not good, most of the time the output, it won't be good. I don't have the time to feed it everything it needs to be good. Like I don't have that sort of bandwidth so I generally just don't do it. Melvin said he can't go live to ask the question, but the question I think is similar. Is the SDR team using AI and what have you found it beneficial in AI workflows in increasing that win rate, et cetera? If they're using it, yeah. I would say like this is a limitation of Gong Engage, which in that Slack channel that you found me in, I think you've heard me say don't like Gong Engage. If you've ever seen me comment on anyone. I'm staunchly against Gong Engage, but I'm stuck with it. One thing I wish AI would tell me more of, which again, maybe it's just a Gong thing, is what emails are actually performing better than others. Like how can AI decipher that? Is it a because it's a certain time of year and we're coming up on budgets. Is it because this email mentions this particular pain point? Like how can AI decipher our own internal data of what's working? If I could take it a step further, I would love if AI could tell me, hey, you set more meetings between the hours of 7:30am and 9:00am and then again from 2:30 to 4:00pm I don't have that data right now. I'm going off of my gut feeling and I'm going, Well I see STRs put in meetings at this time so I'm pretty sure that's when it happens the most. But I want them to be able to see and this is where I want a to pick up is like you set a majority of your meetings between 9 and 10:30. The rest of the team seems to swept between 7:30 and 9. Like what are you doing different? Is it a different territory? Like what's going on there? But I would want it to be personalized not just to the team but to the individual of like here is your best workflow and here's your best output but let's replicate that, let's get that going better. And so far I haven't seen it. I don't have a tool that can do that. Maybe there's one out there and I just don't know about it but that'd be beneficial. Maybe gongengage can't do it, but I don't know what's the if you are super technical. I'm not technical but I'm going to explain what you could be doing here. You should check the API documentation and see what's possible to extract from the app? Because I think even though they, in the analytics of Gong Edge, maybe you can see it, but maybe you can extract this information and make your own model. About that. I'm saying that because I've been doing it right now with some customers, with some tools. We have some limitations, so. Okay, we have some limitations. So I found a worker. That's what I'm saying. I think that's a good way to go about it. And I have a sales enablement guy that maybe can be able to extract that data. We can figure it out. I just, I haven't had the, the time to be able to do it yet. But Austin, just be nice if it did it for me actually. Vincent, do you want to come live to ask your second question? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So my second question was how do you improve the calling quality of your SCRs? So what are tips or recommendations that you can give, especially in the opening that the, the other person that you are calling gets that interest, stays on the line and isn't annoyed about the cold call. I have made some controversial, I guess, takes on LinkedIn around openers, specifically where I had some of your more STR influencers come at me and then their buddies come at me. I can't stand the. Hey, Vincent, I hope this doesn't ruin your day, but it's a cold call. Can you talk? That is probably one of the worst openers I've ever heard in my entire, entire life. Yeah, like, it's not, I'm not a fan of it. What I prefer is like, hey, Vincent, this is Will from Teachtown. I'm giving you a call. I see you're the sped director. Are you the right person? Like, I want it to be very, like, hey, I have you. This is your title, am I correct? Like, just want to make sure I'm right before I talk to you. You might go, yeah, but what is this about? Cool. I get straight to it. Like, I don't. I am not someone who wants to talk about the weather. I don't want to use some cheesy line I want you to get to. Yeah, Vincent, I'm giving you a call because I researched your district. I looked up what's going on at the district and your name is on the strategic plan. And you know my company, I think that we can help you out, achieve those goals. Do you have, you can ask like, do you have three or four minutes to talk about it? I don't like putting a timetable on it. I don't like saying, hey, I want to limit myself to three or four minutes, but does that fall in your, your purview? Is that something you know that you are actively still working on and then the conversation flows from there. I think being very direct with people, not trying to bullshit them, not trying to weasel your way into a conversation by some corny pickup line is the best way to get someone to have an actual conversation with you and be a human. Like, yeah, that'd be my advice. Great, thanks a lot. To follow up on what you just mentioned here, really, it's the account research also sounds like your apps app. I've done some research to make the call so they have some context. So the conversation will be high, the quality will be higher than just calling. All the, maybe the contacts, they are on the list without any contact. So if someone pick ups, they are more prepared to have this conversation. Yeah, I probably get about one to two SDR calls a day for me specifically of trying to sell me something. One of my first questions is, what do you even know about me and what do you know about my company? Nine times out of ten they go, well, I know it's called teach down. Like cool man. Like that's literally no information. You did nothing to do any sort of research. Like, why do you think you can help me? Well, we help a lot of companies. All right, I'm done here. Like, we're not. Like, I'm good. I was like, you can try again later if you do some actual research and find how you can help me. Sure, let's talk. But like I don't, I don't want to just be another number. And that's how I look at my prospects. Like they don't want to just be some, another number on a sheet. They want to be treated like a person. So if you think about the buying experience also it's the best because if you think about all the calls maybe they're receiving every day, no one does this research. And if you are the only one doing it, obviously some people are. Even though you do some research, you have some prospects are going to be pissed about you calling them. But that's the problem with core outreach in general. Because of the bad outreach that they are receiving. They are, they don't like salespeople because of that. But being prepared and knowing what they do here for you specifically, you do some research, you know, maybe the initiative or the stuff they are doing, the conversation will be better. Oh,000%. If anyone want to follow you or connect with you, what's the best way. LinkedIn is definitely a solid place to start. I know that some people avoid your request and which is great. Really appreciate it and that's a good way. If anyone's on the STR leaders of USA1, that's I'm in there too. So really good place to connect and always happy to talk about anything or tell me that I'm wrong. I'm always happy to be wrong as well. Well, well. Thanks so much for for joining us. And yeah, if everyone wants to connect with Will, I will send the recording and I will send also the the link of Will for his linked profile. And yeah, thanks Will for joining us. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks everyone for joining. Thanks Vincent Thanks Mevin for your questions.