Goal setting: A guide to setting and achieving goals for SDRs

I'm going to teach you how to set your goals as an SDR.

You need to learn how to set your goals

If you can get this system right, it's going to give you a reason to hit quota and motivate you to prospect every day.

With this growth comes massive opportunities.

You'll grow in your career, enjoy your job, and get promoted faster.

Unfortunately, so many SDRs don't do it, because they treat their job as a hobby.

You cannot grow without a goal-setting process

Here're some other reasons why SDRs don't do it:

• Because they don't know how to do it

• Winners and losers have the same goals

• They don't have a mentor or a manager to teach them

• Only 8% of people actually accomplish their goals (according to Forbes)

I’m going to share how you can avoid these traps and follow a better plan.

Here's how step by step.

Step 1: Set your personal goal

You cannot grow in your career if you don’t set your personal goals in the first place.

Doing this will help you with the rest.

Before talking about the rest, let's focus on your personal goals.

So let's start with 1 personal goal:

• Buy a car?

• Have a baby?

• To get married?

• Buy a house this year?

• Want to go on holiday for 3 weeks in December?

Let's take an example with buying a car.

Cost of the car: $30k USD.

You have 2 options, with a credit or you can save money and buy it when you have enough money.

Let's say you want to save for 2 years and buy it when you get $30k.

So you need: $30k / 24 months = $1 250 USD / month

(Here I'm not going to cover all your cost of living, taxes, etc, I'm just going to show you 1 specific example)

Step 2: Set your professional & income goals

Now that you have your goal, you need to link it to your income.

So many SDRs focus on the company goal aka your quota.

Stop focusing on your company quota, and build your goals to tie your goals set in step 1.

You need to understand the comp plan of your company and how you can maximize it.

• Commissions on meetings booked? Opportunities qualified? Pipeline qualified?

• Commissions on closed-won opportunities (CW)?

• Other types of commissions: 2-3x accelerator? Extra $$ if the opportunity is greater than $10k?

So let's go back to our example of buying your car.

Let's say you work for a company with $100K ACV with 9-month sales cycles.

8 meetings performed but only 5 qualified per month (63% conversion rate).

Your close rate is 15% of qualified meetings.

Your On Target Earnings (OTE) = $30k base + $400/ meeting qualified + 0.5% ACV

Your OTE = $30,000 + $24,000 (60 meetings qualified) + $4,500 (9 CW) = $58,500

Beyond quota, you get a 2x accelerator on your meetings qualified.

You make $800/ meeting qualified (beyond quota).

We know that you need $1,250 extra per month to buy the car.

So you need an extra $15k / year,

Your income for this year needs to be greater than $73,500 = OTE + $15k

To get this, you need:

• Base: $30k

• Meeting qualified =  $24,000 + $14,400 - 18 meetings qualified (beyond quota)

• % on ACV= $4,500 + $1,350 - 2 CW

= $73,900

Step 3: Create your system

Now, to achieve your goals, you need to create your system.

This step is the most important of your goal-setting process.

Like James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

It's the process you need to execute on a daily basis to achieve your goals.

Let's go back to buying your car.

In step 2, we've seen that you need:

60 + 18 meetings qualified in a year to get 9 + 2 CW to get to our OTE of $73,900.

So let's focus on the 78 meetings qualified.

Booking 78 meetings in a year, is hard.

But, it's much easier when you break it down.

Per month 78/12 = 6-7 meetings qualified

With a conversion rate: meeting performed to meeting qualified: 63%.

You need to book: 6.5/63%= Around 10-11 meetings each month

With a show rate of 70% = 13 meetings booked each month

So 1 meeting booked every 1-2 business days.

Each month:

• 800 cold calls at 0.5% conversion = 4 meetings booked

• 1600 emails at 0.5% conversion = 8 meetings booked

• 400 LinkedIn messages at 0.25% conversion = 1 meeting booked

For your conversion rate:

• If you are new to your company: check the average on the team

• If you are not new: check your average on the past 3 months

Each month: 20 business days.

Your daily plan:

• 40 daily cold calls

• 80 daily emails

• 20 daily LinkedIn messages

Voilà, you have a daily plan to achieve your goals (buy your car), and a reason to execute your process, every single day.

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TL;DR

Step 1: Set your personal goal

Step 2: How to tie this goal to it your SDR job

Step 3: Create your daily system

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So, there we go. Thanks for reading.

That's all for this Sunday. 1 simple tip for SDRs.

See you again next Sunday.

Cheers,

Elric

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