Co-Authored by Melanie Tummino & Christian DiRomualdo
Fresh out of onboarding and training, jumping on the phones can be a daunting, yet exciting time for a new BDR or SDR. If you’ve done your job well as a sales manager or trainer, you’ll likely see your reps scheduling meetings fresh out of training, right?
Well, I hate to break it to you all, but cold calling – even when done right – doesn’t see results right away all of the time.
At Reveneer, we began tracking different metrics across our newly launched teams starting in Q4 2019 in order to better understand why some teams started off hot out of the gates and others took more time to land their first meeting.
With over 35 customers in verticals ranging from enterprise software platforms, to hardware, to application security…we deal with quite a diverse array of prospects. With all of these verticals, training brand new BDRs and SDRs during a week-long bootcamp to prepare them for the phones the following Monday is certainly a challenge.
While balancing customer-specific product knowledge along with the Reveneer Sales Methodology, these brave souls are ready to hop on the phones and start dialing live prospects within a week. Once they start calling we begin to track four different metrics across each team and each rep:
- Dials: How many outbound calls are made
- Connects: When a prospect answers the phone
- Conversations: A ‘connect’ that resulted in a conversation that was two minutes or longer with a prospect
- Meeting Scheduled: A prospect agreed to a call-to-action as the next step – a discovery call or a product demonstration
There are a number of different factors that affect production fresh out of training: industry/vertical, company size, persona, call volume, contact information of prospects, etc., so while having over 35 teams trained, you can begin to imagine how that can vary from team to team.
Starting in Q4 2019, we have gathered metrics across 130+ reps trained on various teams, and here is what we found on average per rep:
Within the first two weeks (or 10 business days) of calling, we have found that ~73% of our reps have scheduled their first meeting: the majority of our reps (~64%) schedule it between 2-10 days and ~9% schedule it on their very first day of calling. In totality, the vast majority of reps we train schedule their first meeting before the 20th business day – that’s 90% of our reps, or roughly 117 reps out of the 130 we have tracked.
Now, let’s take an even deeper dive! Overall, we found that our reps have the strongest odds of scheduling their first meeting on a Wednesday, and it will take 10 days or less of calling, at least 200 dials, and roughly 4 conversations to make it happen. Can it get more specific than that?! Probably not, but feel free to explore our First Meeting Dash (linked below) to get a visual of the metrics described above.
Not only are these statistics extremely useful for Reveneer as a company, especially when evaluating performance of both our reps and executive teams, but it can also give some insight to a brand new BDR or SDR about where their expectations should align when given specific factors. Considering 96% of our reps are scheduling their first meeting with a prospect within the first full month of calling, this goes to show that our onboarding reps have the following metrics to keep in mind as they begin calling. This too can also add a little friendly competition amongst the few who are able to lock down their first meeting on the first day of calling, adding to that ~currently~ small percentile.
Every day, Reveneer is learning more and more about how to make stronger business decisions, and the most effective way to do that is by allowing historical data to make those decisions for us. As Reveneer becomes more data-driven, we have also become more confident while taking our next steps as a growing business because we base our decisions using data, data, and more data; most importantly, the right data at the right time, which in turn allows for optimal results.
Gone are the days of, “You’ll get your first meeting when you get it” because we can now inform our freshly trained reps with confidence-building statistics, such as having ~4 conversations or making ~200 dials with prospects before they schedule their first meeting – and this is only the tip of the iceberg in the data world.
For a deeper dive into our “Time to First Meeting” data, check out our interactive dashboard our amazing data analyst Melanie Tummino created!
