The ultimate AE/SDR Collaboration Deck
For the AE and SDR relationship to work well it needs both players to input their ideas, agree on a plan and to execute.
Its a partnership - the SDR does not work for the AE.
But AEs and SDRs are at a different point in their lives and experience.
They might physically be at a different place in their lives - one working in an office surrounded by hundreds of other SDRs, and the AE out in the field, working from home, or in a different office.
They might also be at different experience levels - typically the AE is more tenured with the SDR early on their sales journey.
So consistent and effective collaboration between the two is essential.
You can do this with a weekly call.
You can do it with a Powerpoint deck that gets shared around,
But I prefer to do it with a Google Slide deck.
Google Slides are collaborative and easy for both parties to update.
Google Slides can be bookmarked for easy access every day
Here are the key areas of the slide deck that I use.
Who’s in the team, and their roles and responsibilities
Detail in your words what each person’s responsibilities are. This isn’t laying down the law, more a basis for discussion and agreement so there are no surprises later on “Oh I thought you were doing that”
Perhaps you don’t have a 121 model, perhaps there is also an extended team of Sales Engineer or Customer Success Manager - if so add additional parties in and make sure everyone is in agreement with who is doing what.
I would rather my SDR pushed back and said “that’s not what I’m supposed to be doing” than things fall between the cracks.
Targets
Its easy as an AE to just think about your goals - but your SDR has their own personal and corporate ambitions.
How do they make their number? What happens if they go over? What do they need in order to get promoted?
Know this and then you can help them get there.
Conversely it is useful for your SDR to know how you hit your number, and what happens if you go over.
Metrics
I love this slide. Looking at average deal sizes and average close ratios, how many opportunities do we need to generate each month in order to hit our collective targets.
If we don’t like the numbers what can we do differently now - can we look for larger opps? Can we figure out how to improve our win rate?
Its important for your SDR and yourself to be aligned at this point - because if not, your SDR might be smiling away generating pipeline that doesn’t help you hit your quota or vice versa.
Territory overview
This will be slightly different if you sell Enterprise or SMB - but triage your territory.
80% of your bookings will come from 20% of your accounts.
If you have 100 accounts, then 20 of those might be priority or key accounts, another 40 might be nurture accounts and another 40 might be whitespace or long tail accounts.
Territory Map
These slides are the ones I have on my screen every day.
A bird’s eye view of the accounts in each segment. I have this on screen and I am always going left to right, up and down, just reminding myself of what I am doing next for each of them.
Yes this information is all in CRM, but this view makes sure I leave no-one behind.
Every day I will say “Ah yes ACME - let me follow up with Mark about this new analyst report”
I call it my “plate spinning” slide - every week I spin each account to keep it moving.
Account Canvas
For the priority accounts we now go a level deeper - a one page ‘canvas’ for each account with what we know, what their priorities and vision are, who we know, what the opportunities are.
This is NOT a replacement for CRM, but more a doodle space for the SDR and AE to talk through on their calls - is this still our understanding, has anything changed - do we need to update anything in CRM.
It is useful because you can flip account to account much quicker than you can in CRM.
Prospecting Calendar
Now we have a slide breaking down the next quarter week by week.
In this the SDR and AE look forward and map out the campaigns they will work on together.
These might be account based - “We’ll focus on ACME in Week 3 of March”, or they might be wider “The AE will draft an industry blog in Week 2 of April”
It ensures you aren’t chasing your tail on the weekly kick off call - you have a plan that stretches out in front of you and ensures no account is left behind.
I then have a campaign ideas slide where we thrown down ideas that might be further out - a newsletter or an event we might start planning.
This is a collaborative exercise for both AE and SDR to input into.
Additional slides
Then depending on the type of business you run, there may be slides on inflight projects, customer success measurement, adoption.
My deck ends up being from 50 to 100 slides long.
But, it is never presented like a presentation - it is a collaborative working space.
One week we may spend time reviewing the prospecting slides, another we are looking at two priority accounts.
Whenever we have a new topic or concept, we add that into the deck rather than creating another place to remember.
Ownership
The AE owns this deck, and shares it out to their SDR(s).
On your weekly checkin with the SDR, bring up the deck, you’ll likely go straight to the account section and prospecting, but also take time to validate nothing has changed in the front section - quotas - roles and responsibilities and so on.
I have this as a template, which you can download here.
Happy collaborating!
See you next week!
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