550 - Demystifying Outsourced SDRs: Key Insights for Success with Filip Popov
Why you should listen
- Learn from Filip Popov's journey from an SDR to VP of Partnerships, with practical advice on managing sales prospecting.
- Discover effective methods to automate and streamline your top-of-funnel activities.
- Hear success stories and specific scenarios where outsourced SDRs made a significant impact.
Feeling overwhelmed with the front end of your sales funnel? In this episode, I talk to Filip Popov from Growth Era about how outsourced SDRs can bridge the gap when your team cannot manage initial sales prospecting. Filip shares insights from his extensive sales experience, offering solutions for businesses looking to boost their lead-generation efforts effectively.
Key Highlights
- Overview of Growth Era and ideal clients: Growth Era primarily focuses on the US market, working with companies ranging from small consulting firms to large enterprises. They target organizations that are looking to generate sales from the US and Canada, with a sweet spot of 20-50 employees where the owner or a single sales rep is responsible for finding new business. They work across various industries including SaaS, manufacturing, cybersecurity, and more, but avoid highly commoditized services like digital marketing and insurance.
- The role and challenges of SDRs: Filip explains that the SDR role is relatively new, with the number of SDRs globally growing from 700,000 in 2022 to over 1 million in 2023. SDRs are responsible for the high-volume prospecting and lead generation work, which can be emotionally draining. Growth Era trains new SDRs for 4 weeks, but sees a 30-40% retention rate as the role is often different from what people expect. A key challenge is helping prospects understand that SDRs are not just call center agents, but professional prospectors.
- Differentiating SDRs from Account Executives: SDRs focus on the high-volume prospecting and lead generation work, booking meetings for the Account Executives. The AEs then take over for the more in-depth discovery and sales conversations. SDRs are responsible for making calls, sending emails, and leveraging other channels to find and qualify new leads, while AEs focus on closing deals.
- Growth Era's pipeline management offering: In addition to their SDR services, Growth Era also offers a "pipeline management" offering. This involves deploying a "Business Opportunity Manager" who acts as a project manager within the client's CRM, helping to ensure deals are properly tracked, followed up on, and advanced through the sales process. This helps address the common challenge of sales reps not properly updating their CRM or setting next steps.
About Filip Popov
Filip Popov is currently the VP of Partnerships at Growth Era. Professional background entirely in sales, starting from an SDR to then Customer Success and Account Executive. Was the key figure in a lot of experimentation while scaling our company around the prospecting approach, company structure, and management, and crystalizing the ICP. Loves psychology and being social, hence the passion for sales. Loves learning and keeping an open mind about new developments and best practices in the sales dev space.
Resources and Links
- Growthera.com
- Filip’s LinkedIn profile
- Book: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- Make It Happen Mondays - B2B Sales Talk with John Barrows
- 30 Minutes to President's Club
- Previous episode: 549 - Expert Outreach Strategies to Drive Top of Funnel Success with Tom Simpson
- Check out more episodes of The Paul Higgins Show
- Paul Higgins Mentoring Youtube channel
- Tech Consultant’s Roadmap
- Join our newsletter
- Join the Tech Collective
- Suggested resources
- Find out more about Paul and how he can help you
BONUS: Get 10% discount on GrowthEra’s Sales Dev service. To avail of the discount, just let Filip know that you heard him from this podcast.
