1/ How we 3x’d SDR productivity with 1 change at Brex:

80% of Brex’s revenue was sourced through sales outbound. The 2 teams doing outbound were SDR and AE.

2/ SDR’s focused exclusively on creating opportunities through outbound. AE’s created their own opportunities through outbound and worked opportunities to close. Despite spending less time on outbound, the avg AE was generating more revenue through outbound than the avg SDR.

3/ Digging a layer deeper, SDR’s were creating more opportunities, but those opportunities converted at a lower rate, and the ones that did convert generated far less revenue than opportunities sourced by AE’s. We had a quality problem.

4/ Brex served a large addressable market. There were verticals and sub-verticals where we had stronger p/m fit, and customers generated exponentially more revenue based on their spending behavior.

5/ AE’s were incentivized 100% on closed revenue. SDR’s were incentivized 100% on opportunity creation. This incentive structure drove different types of behavior that ultimately resulted in the SDR quality problem described above -

6/ they were generating a high quantity of low quality opportunities. They didn’t care about revenue. And they shouldn’t have with the incentive structure in place.

7/ We decided to try incentivizing SDR’s 100% on revenue generated from the opportunities they sourced. The next month we saw an immediate impact - conversion rates went up and deal sizes increased.

8/ Over the next few months the average productivity (revenue contribution) of each SDR increased by 3x. They surpassed their AE counterparts in sourced revenue - as it should be.

9/ This doesn’t mean every SDR team should be incentivized 100% on revenue from the opportunities they source. My intuition is the following: 1) If the team is outbound focused (not inbound), 2) you have a transactional sale (<30 days), and

10/ 3) you have wide variance in conversion rates and ACV’s by opportunity type, then you should be incentivizing your SDR team, at least in part, on closed revenue and not opportunity creation.

11/ Ashley Kelly does a nice job of highlighting this at the 8 minute mark of this session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BowmKgANgLA