Building Sales Development from Scratch w/ Mike Farrell

Outbound Sales Lift

#63: Listen as Mike Farrell, CEO of Green Leads, talks about his experience with sales development and startup companies. He touches on how to set up your growth stage strategically, things to consider with a new sales development team, and whether to insource or outsource sales development.

Click here for the full episode show notes & more!

Forming A Sales Development Team (0:38)

When thinking about adding a sales development team, talent, internal support training, and tech stack are common things people go to. But the time and opportunity cost is probably the biggest factor.

The growth speed depends on how much horsepower has been put behind it, budget-wise, and everything from the get-go.

Once you get a full-time manager and have all the investments of the tech stack, the data, the sales enablement, the training component of it, and the training program, that's when you've started to recoup your investment.

It could be a full 18 to 24 months to see an SDR organization mature, guaranteed that you start from scratch.

There are going to be bumps along the way. Mike has seen companies let go of an outsourced firm after they've built themselves up on their own, and then all of a sudden, a year or two later, they come back to the firm they initially hired.

Balancing Insourcing and Outsourcing (4:44)

The maturity level of the marketing organization in terms of driving awareness, driving leads, and driving people to the website is very indicative of where a company is in its sourcing.

CML or a VP of marketing is one of the early strategic hires. A lot of the sales efforts initially are founder-led, but they'll hire a marketer and start building up that marketing infrastructure.

They have to have an SDR, either outsourced from an outsource SDR company like Mike's or insourced from hiring within the organization.

As the company grows, there comes the point where the founders can't do everything.

When you have a product-market fit and have to hit the gas, you have to have a sales professional or sales leader because, at that point, you're probably going to have some additional funding.

Marketing and Sales Alignment (8:17)

There can definitely be contention on who owns the SDR function. For example, is it owned by the sales leader or by the marketing leader?

If the marketing leader is the first one in, they typically own that function because they generate leads that need follow-up.

Then, when the sales leaders come in, there should be a little bit of a turf battle because they're the ones who have to build an organization. So they've got to scale.

The chief revenue officer is supposed to be the person that ties in sales and marketing and even customer success into a single leader. So maybe it's just as a VP of sales initially or a couple of senior sales executives, and that's how you start the sales organization until, eventually, it's a CRO.

Whether you hire one at a time or multiple at once depends on how much you have from a venture funding standpoint.