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If you think outbound is dead, you’re either lying or you’re bad at it.
Quotas keep rising, your people are grinding, and the pipeline isn’t growing. It’s an equation that drives you mad. While everyone wants more opportunities, only a few know how to build an outbound culture that delivers.
I’m Todd Busler, former VP of Sales, now co-founder of Champify, and I’ve spent my career sharpening how to build a company pipeline that’s self-sufficient.
On this show, I’m talking to sales leaders who have cracked the outbound code. They’ve built an outbound culture beyond their SDRs and scaled repeatable systems that drive real pipeline without relying on hacks.
We’ll break down the winning plays, processes, and frameworks behind growing that outbound muscle to help you get results faster.
No fluff. No hacks. Real strategies from real people who have done it so you can stop guessing and start opening.
Austin Hitchcock (00:00):
At the end of the day, as an AE, you need to be the CEO of your business. And if you are not taking ownership over your own pipeline, whether it's three x four x, five x of your quota, then it's really hard to get the relationships internally to work.
Todd Busler (00:18):
Everyone wants to build stronger pipeline, but only a few know how to make it happen. If you're listening to this show, outbound is not dead, you just need a little help building a system that actually works. Well, you're in the right place. I'm Todd Busler and on this show we're breaking down the plays, processes and frameworks behind repeatable pipeline growth straight from the people who've built it. Let's get into it.
(00:45):
Alright, for all the listeners out there that are involved in the SDR program in your company, whether you're a leader, you're a VP of Sales that's now taking over the SDR organization, you're going to love this episode with Austin Hitchcock. He's one of the few sales tech leaders that has been at his company for almost a decade. He joined Highspot sub a million dollars in ARR. They're well worth of a hundred million dollars now. At one point the team was 120 plus. He's been through every variation of comp structures and training and pod models and all different things that you've thought about, this person has seen and done. This episode's super tactical, gets into the weeds, but for anyone trying to improve their SDR function, this is a must-listen. I hope you enjoy. Austin, how are we doing?
Austin Hitchcock (01:32):
Good, Todd, how are you?
Todd Busler (01:33):
I'm great, man. I appreciate you taking some time and sharing some knowledge with the audience. I got to start with almost a decade at Highspot. Very rare in the tech sales circles. What keeps you inspired and excited in your role today?
Austin Hitchcock (01:48):
Yeah, I get that one a lot. Every stage of this journey has been fun. It's been interesting. It's definitely been different. I've had the chance to build the ADR team kind of from the ground up and now we're really focused on that next evolution. It's what are we doing in AI and how are we scaling from that lens? But honestly, I would say what keeps it interesting and gratifying for me personally is the people. There's no better feeling when I get that seven figure win alert in your inbox and you open that thing up and you look at who it's coming from and it's someone who is currently an enterprise or strategic AE that was once an ADR on the team years ago. I think that's a really, really cool thing and something that I certainly cherish.
Todd Busler (02:32):
And honestly give the people a little bit of background. How big was the company when you got there? I think most people are well aware of what Highspot does, but maybe even just a quick intro in the space you're planning and who you're selling to as well?
Austin Hitchcock (02:44):
Yeah, absolutely. I started a Highspot as one of the founding SDRs at the time. We were 25 employees and we were really just trying to find product-market fit. We had a couple of customers, but we didn't really know what the space was going to be that we were selling into. Highspot today occupies a space in sales enablement, but that did not exist when we first started selling. And so a lot of it was defining who's responsible for enablement today and back then who we primarily sold to was dramatically different than who we sell to today. And so a lot of building out the SDR team at the time was getting feelers out there, building awareness, learning about the market, educating people on what we can help companies do. It's dramatically different now. You see VPs of Enablement, C-suite even caring about this, lots of people in the space that practice enablement, lots of change thus far in the 10 years I've been here and a lot of overlap and a lot of adjacent markets. But it's been a really cool space to watch.
Todd Busler (03:51):
It's a awesome journey. I think a ton of people in tech jump around. I had a six plus year run at a company. You just get to see so many different stages and chapters. I didn't know you were even that early, right? Which is like, what's that thing again? What space are you in? And you didn't even know, right? You're trying to figure out who are we selling to? What is the actual value we're building on the fly, which is a fun stage, but very different. Now you've helped lead this major transformation or maturity of the entire ADR org. And I think what's interesting is from the fine product-market fit get your first 20 customers phase and then also you were leading teams during kind of the grow it all cost style in today 2025. What's a modern high performing outbound ADR function look like and mean to you?
Austin Hitchcock (04:39):
Yeah, well I think to start, I'll talk a little bit about where we came from because you just brought this up. The grow at all costs era for us was, it was pretty crazy. I think back on it now five years or so later, four or five years I guess you'd say. And the world looks a lot different. Back in the early days at Highspot, I would say we were on the front end of adopting technology to help SDRs prospect. We were also hyper aware of the perils of an engagement tool. So I think back in the day there were tools like Tout app that were essentially just marketing spam if you will. And so we were really against that notion and we leaned super hard the other way into, and it worked really well. We were getting high quality pipeline. We were getting the ATL contacts that we wanted to get in front of.
(05:34):
And we were, like I mentioned earlier, primarily educating them on why they should care about enablement and how they're going to use it as a way to drive behavior change on the sales side. And it worked. It absolutely worked, but it certainly had a ceiling, so it wasn't scalable, right? Around 2020, 2021, we grew the team up into 120 SDRs globally and a ton of additional management layers. And that era was all about volume in a world of one-to-one personalization. So we had this goal as a business and our VP at the time, his goal was to be in every single deal, which with our model didn't really make sense because we were a low volume, high quality. We wanted to make sure that we were not spending too much time on AEs fielding meetings. And it helped us grow a lot. We learned a lot along the way, but for obvious reasons, it came at a cost, right?
(06:27):
It was expensive to run. It got to a point where even though they were high quality meetings, AEs were not progressing the deals very well. We were in deals where we didn't really belong and that made the rest of them go to market super inefficient. And so win rates dropped AEs. Culturally, I think the PG culture that we had at the time was not optimal because of that, meaning AEs were being fed constantly and so they could be a little bit nitpicky around the pipeline that came in. And so imagine as a prospect, you're like a VP at a mid-size company and SDR reaches out to you with hyper-personalized messaging, catches you on a cold call, you come to a meeting around a topic that you're somewhat interested in but you're not entirely sure is something you want to focus on right now. And the AE is doing additional qualification and essentially trying to treat you like an inbound prospect.
(07:26):
And so that was the motion that we had very, very inefficient in that regards. And so I'd say shifting to your actual question, which was what does a modern team look like today? It's way fewer reps. It's a team that is responsible for pipeline generation, but they aren't the only source. We try very hard to make sure that there is a strong pipeline generation culture across the business where every team that touches the customer has some sort of ownership on pipeline tighter relationships. That's key. So we used to live in a world where our ADRs had round robin patches where every lead and every meeting that they set up went to the next up AE. So they weren't able to drive a good relationship with those AEs that they were working with because they might be working with 10 different AEs at any given point in time. So now we've got a maximum of a three to one ratio. So any rep working with three or less other reps at any given point in time, and it's a patch model, so the accounts and territories they work on, they're shared with the other reps that they're in that patch with. So that's been key. And then outbound itself is strategic. We're going above the line. We're scaling with processes and technology, not necessarily headcount.
Todd Busler (08:47):
There's a ton to dive into and most of this episode I think is going to be a lot more tactical than others. I talked to a lot of VP Sales CROs and they're honestly not as close to this pipeline motion that you are. So I'm really excited to get into some of these tactics. And I think what's interesting about your background, Austin, is you've seen every flavor of pod structure pairing comp models. Is it a point system? Is it on the ops, right? What does the A on right? You've probably tested in iterated on every flavor of that. Right? Before we get into some of the details, what's one thing you believe when it comes to building pipeline? And I say that because not just ADR motion. I agree with you. It's hand in hand that others in the industry might challenge or disagree with.
Austin Hitchcock (09:28):
I think the controversial thought there is that more pipeline is not always better. And it took us a long time to learn that and we had to shift everything that we do both structurally as well as process wise to be able to for that statement to be true. But I do think that that is a bit of a controversial take that a lot of companies want to operate with. More pipeline, more meetings is better. It just depends on what stage that you're at. I see a lot of, and I'm sure you can relate to this, a lot of people on LinkedIn talking about a comments playbook or pipeline for our pipeline playbook that we'll share with you. And there's a lot of good stuff out there, but copying and pasting what other companies are doing and trying to apply it to your business is never going to work. It's like your golf swing, right? You're watching YouTube videos about how to fix your slice. You're not that person. You have a different body type, a different handicap, it's not going to work for you. And so I think that in general, that's probably a controversial take one that others would disagree with, but I see it all the time on LinkedIn.
Todd Busler (10:32):
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. There's just too many factors, how much money you've raised, how much are you willing to pay to acquire a customer? How long do they stick around? How big is your tam? It's impossible, right? I agree with that. And it's becoming more of a common theme even in this podcast alone. I recorded yesterday with, it was the previous enablement leader at Wiz and AppDynamics, and he's like, people are just obsessed with this pipeline coverage. And it's like, look, at the end of the day what we're trying to do is maximize the revenue and there's a lot of different ways to get there.
Austin Hitchcock (11:02):
How do you even define pipeline, right? It's so nuanced. What does that even mean? And we've changed that almost every year I've been here. And so at the end of the day, what is pipeline to you?
Todd Busler (11:12):
How do you do it now? Tactically, there's some organizations that are like, Hey, we get a first meeting, there's pipeline, others go really strict and have this ban stuff. Where have you landed in 2025?
Austin Hitchcock (11:23):
I think there's always a balance between how much do you want to use your team to drive awareness versus qualified pipeline or revenue. We're very much on the far other end of that spectrum right now and it's closer to revenue. But there were times in which we were part of the goal was just to drive awareness. It didn't matter if the pipeline actually went anywhere. And so there's an ROI associated to that as well. But today our reps are working tiered accounts with their account executives. Each AE and each ADR has an expectation of working a set of accounts that are in their top priority level. And from there they're building out account game plans. They're relationship mapping the deals. They're figuring out a whole strategy and ABM strategy essentially prior to even doing any outreach. And then the goal for my team is to drive qualified pipeline in the sense of a stage two op.
(12:16):
We track everything from outputs to meetings to conversion rates, but recently we moved to just compensating reps on that stage two opportunity, which essentially means that they have the right buyers identified and the company has communicated that they're going to either they're going to solve this problem, they've got money aside to dedicate to this, and the likelihood of us either winning or losing is pretty high. And so depending on the segment, I mean that can take three plus months to get to that stage after their first meeting. And prior to this, we had a hybrid where we would pay reps on the meeting. So initial qualified meeting, and then once it moves to opportunity, and I was a big fan of that model because it felt like it gave the ADRs, SDRs agency in being able to control what they can control because there's a lot of AE discrepancy when it comes to what exactly is a pipeline opportunity.
(13:19):
I will say though I was wrong, we have increased our conversion rates from SQL to OP, 2X almost. We're a little over a quarter in now, and for obvious reasons, reps are creating less SQLs unless they're confident they're going to move to pipeline. But I think that the hidden thing that I didn't realize in transitioning to just an opportunity metric is the relationship between the AE and the ADR has never been stronger. And I think it's been critical for our PG culture because AE is now fully trust that their ADRs are in it for the exact same reasons as them. There's no finger pointing, there's no disqualification, there's no real bad behavior around who's getting credit for what. And that has removed so much friction internally. And so I just as a business, we're much more efficient.
Todd Busler (14:05):
When you go on that model, which is just to summarize for everyone is essentially, Hey, I don't really care about the meeting. Sure, it's an entry point. There has to be some high level of qualification where reps are excited before an ADR is getting any credit. Nine out of 10 times that leads to way better targeting just persona and account. But it also typically leads to after a meeting prep and post first meeting kind of collaborating on what are we doing? Can you talk about the second part? What is your best one or two ADRs doing after they get a meeting with maybe it's not the perfect persona, but it's the perfect account in the area you need to sell to. What does that collaboration look like as tactically as possible?
Austin Hitchcock (14:48):
Yeah, it is educating that buyer in the first meeting. Who else within their organization needs to be involved? Who else are we typically seeing in companies like theirs that are involved in a buying decision and explaining to them what's in it for them and how we can help them navigate their own internal organization. I think in that world, it's really defined as buyer enablement. It's enabling your buyer on how best to buy your software. I think that is what the best reps are doing, and they're doing that even before the meeting. They're sending the follow up. If they caught someone on a cold call, they're nurturing with here. Some of the people that we see internally at your company that we typically work with, does it make sense to add them onto this first meeting or kind of dropping that hint in our DSR? So we use digital sales rooms and we'll talk about that in the DSRs and who else is involved because multithreading is key.
(15:42):
And we used to actually compensate on multithreading. We pay on the first meeting and then we pay on secondary meetings and we try to get really cute with what is the criteria for a first meeting, a second meeting, things like that. Come to find out that every business is going to be different. They're all going to buy differently. And so we could have the perfect framework or perfect way to identify what we consider as a qualified meeting, a second qualified meeting, but that still might not lead to that organization opening up an opportunity with us and actually committing to a buying process. And so I guess to answer your question tactfully, it's following up ensuring that we're educating them on how other organizations like them buy knowing deeply who their colleagues are, what they care about, and ideally leaning on them to help champion it.
Todd Busler (16:37):
I like your framing there, and we think about this a lot internally, but a lot of the best leaders, it's like, look, your job is buyer enablement. Teach them how to buy this. You are experts. Teach them how to do this. And I think that's a huge part of it. Austin, you mentioned the farer false belief that more pipeline is necessarily better. You talked about how you drive better ADR-AE relationship. What do leaders get wrong when it comes to structuring or scaling these ADR organizations? What else?
Austin Hitchcock (17:10):
I see people on both ends of the spectrum right now. A lot of people want to use AI SDRs to essentially scale without any humans at all. I don't see that working today, at least not yet, particularly in B2B enterprise SaaS. There needs to be human involvement. So that's one end of the spectrum. And then on the other end, it's this scaling with humans and expecting the output to increase proportionately. So I think we talked about this earlier, but it's really around pipeline is nuanced and leaders get that wrong day in day out, and you have to constantly ask yourself, even if the metrics look good, where are the gaps? Where are the leaks in the funnel? Where would we like to see more? What are the behavior of the reps when they get these meetings and these opportunities? Because you might think a certain conversion rate in the funnel is good and it's only good because it is a little bit better than what it used to be.
Todd Busler (18:07):
The role has definitely changed. You just talked about this in my opinion as well, over obsession with can we automate this whole function? And I don't believe that's real or will be anytime soon. However, the role has changed, right? I was just talking with our AE prepping for a call today, one of our AEs, and he's like, man, I need to get better at some of this AI stuff. I'm like, yes, absolutely. Right? And that's becoming a critical trait that you look for. What are you looking for in 2025 from a skillset perspective for the best ADRs, and how has that shifted over the last couple of years?
Austin Hitchcock (18:40):
I've always thought that selling is inherently human and whatever makes you personable is something you should lean into. So that hasn't changed, and I don't think that will change because you still need to break through the noise in your prospecting outreach. What I'm seeing today, and actually you talked about this on LinkedIn and I fully agree with is there's still a number of different directions an SDR can go in to be successful. There isn't a one size fits all playbook and some SDRs are really, really good at cold calling and that is still working. I don't care what anyone says that is working, it's the fastest way to get in front of someone and have a conversation and set up a meeting. You can be wizards on the phone. There's a lot of technology out there right now that enables you to call faster, call better, connect better, et cetera.
(19:32):
So being really good on the phone is huge into today's world, as big as it has ever been in my opinion. Just in terms of a differentiator. In addition to that, I think a lot of people are, especially with this new generation, embracing the content creation and that can come to life in a number of ways, but we've always been high on creativity when it comes to a personal touch to prospect someone. And we've defined that internally as videos or handwritten notes or gifting, and I think that reps do that really well. I might get some attention for this, but I get a handful of LinkedIn messages a day. I almost never get a video on LinkedIn. And when I have, I book a meeting with them, it shows that they actually care, they want to talk to me. And that doesn't take too long.
(20:23):
Just recording a quick 10, 15 second video instead of your email template and telling me why it's important that we have a conversation. I think that skill goes a long way. And then AI people are coming out of college actually knowing how to prompt, and I think we've come a long way in the last year or two in terms of how to leverage AI to be successful. Obviously there's a lot of technology you can buy at the business level, but just from a skillset standpoint, reps are using it in extremely creative ways. I don't think it's about prompts anymore. I think it's not copying and pasting the right prompt or having the right cheat sheet. It's about getting creative and having a conversation with the AI and trying to find gaps in your research or your messaging or what have you that you can lean on AI to help fill for you. So it's more bespoke, I think, than it has ever been. So those are the three skills, elite phone skills, creativity and prompting and using AI.
Todd Busler (21:23):
Awesome. We think similarly. I want to dive into a couple examples. One thing that I think your career has afforded you is, and you kind of subtly brought this up multiple times, but you're always looking at key metrics, right? Conversion through each funnel, productivity of rep. How fast can we get that? Before we hit record, we were talking about velocity of deals, right? Can you maybe tell me an example of when something, one of those metrics in the funnel or ramp times starts to go off inevitably in any of these companies that either Champify scale or your scale or Salesforce scale, there's something that's going to go off the rails a little bit and the best leaders are really good at identifying that and then going to fix that. Is there maybe an example or two where you're like, Hey, here's what I've seen and here's exactly how we go approach fixing it?
Austin Hitchcock (22:12):
In terms of some sort of gap in the funnel?
Todd Busler (22:14):
Yeah. I'll give you an example. I remember this vividly when I was at Heap. We had a new COO come in, very operational sound, best operator I ever worked for. And at one point we saw our meeting to op conversion rate drop by like 40%. It was like six out of every 10 meetings went to an opportunity. At one point it was 28% and we're like, oh, shit, it's really hard to make outbound work if this is the case. And we had a SWAT team and here's what we did. And is there any examples like that that you have throughout your run that come to mind?
Austin Hitchcock (22:47):
I talked a little bit about this earlier, but we've seen a dramatic increase in the top of funnel conversion since moving to a later stage, KPI for quota and commission for my team. And it wasn't until we did that that we realized that there was an issue at all because you're always comparing your metrics to years prior, or you have some sort of benchmark from your company's VC and you look at it and you're like, okay, cool, but this does not relate at all to our business. All these metrics are vastly different in how we sell. And so I think the best way to inspect a metric, even if it doesn't look bad right now, is to get in the deals and figure out what is the common thread, what's missing, what is not moving from one stage to the next and why? And a lot of it's coming from AE feedback on, Hey, we're noticing a lot of reps are rejecting these meetings or these meetings aren't converting. Why is that? And getting in those conversations and actually talking to the AEs. When I think about redefining your ICP in the early days, we were defining it as we went. We were building awareness, we were learning about who's going to buy us and who's not. I do think that targeting the right accounts at the right time and the right messaging with the right people, that's always going to help you build better qualified pipeline. But it's really hard to get that feedback unless you're talking to the field.
Todd Busler (24:15):
I want to dig into a topic that I don't think gets talked about enough, and I believe with your tenure, you'll have some interesting things to say. I think a big part of the best ADR, BDR leaders out there is they're really good at influencing other parts of the organization. Specifically what I mean is you talked about having a big impact and driving efficiency, not surprised by any of that, but with that comes a lot of changes in AE behavior. So how do you play your role of, look, you're not the boss of the AEs, but you do have to coach and influence their behavior. How do you go about that? Is this relationship building with individual AEs that have a lot of weight in the organization? Is this getting with the VPs of certain segments of the organization? How do you go and make that work?
Austin Hitchcock (25:02):
I think it starts with establishing the relationships with leadership. It has to start with the PG culture, right? The sales leaders need to care and they need to be holding AEs accountable for their own pipeline. In other words, it doesn't really matter how much comes from different sources. At the end of the day, as an AE, you need to be the CEO of your business. And if you are not taking ownership over your own pipeline, whether it's three x four x, five x of your quota, then it's really hard to get the relationships internally to work. And what I mean by that is at Highspot, way more than half of our pipeline comes from outbound. And we also have a notion of allbound, which we can talk about, but that's essentially inbound and outbound and it all runs through the account development team. But if I'm an AE and my leader isn't holding me accountable to building a hundred percent of my pipeline, so let's say 60% of that pipeline on average comes from the account development team, 10 or 20% from partner, and I as an AE am responsible for the remainder.
(26:07):
Any given point in time, I've got to be building pipeline and I've got to be responsible for the a hundred percent, not the 20 or the 30 sliver of the a hundred percent. If I don't get that, I'm going to fail regardless. And so it starts with establishing that expectation with the business with AE leadership and setting checkpoints to hold reps accountable. We do QBR with ADRs and AEs that are joint where they're coming to the table talking about the accounts that they are earmarked for generating pipeline this quarter and what their specific strategies are for each account. That's huge. And then on a weekly basis, they upload videos into a Slack channel around where are they at with each one of those accounts. And so...
Todd Busler (26:52):
Say more about that. That's really interesting. Say more.
Austin Hitchcock (26:55):
The recording video?
Todd Busler (26:57):
Yeah, the videos.
Austin Hitchcock (26:57):
Yeah. So essentially each week as kind of a buffer in between our QBRs, AEs and ADRs together and independently are recording videos five, 10 minutes long talking about their top deals that just entered the pipeline and what their strategy is to help them convert through the pipeline as well as their next step accounts. So these are accounts that they've targeted, they've either already researched or they've begun prospecting with their ADR or SDR as a goal of getting them in the pipeline at some point this quarter. And that all goes back to driving the right culture with leadership and having those conversations. And then I'd say the final thing is leveraging best practices and talking about best practices across the go-to market on who's doing what. Every AE wants to know what are other SDRs doing for other AEs, right? Is my SDR doing the right things for me? Could they be upleveling in any way?
Todd Busler (27:55):
I find the best AEs are always actually on the hunt learning from the top SDRs.
Austin Hitchcock (27:59):
Totally.
Todd Busler (28:00):
Right? The ones that are like, no, I'm in my ways. I'm an OG. I've been doing this forever. That best ones are actually like, wait, what is this 23-year-old kid doing that I'm not doing, right? What do I need to be copying? And the right organizations are learning both ways. It's a subtle point that I think really important that you just mentioned though.
Austin Hitchcock (28:17):
Absolutely. And the best organizations have set up a world where the relationship between the ADR and the SDR or AE and SDR are mutually beneficial. And what I mean by that is at least internally at Highspot, I mentioned our ratios. We have a patch model where an SDR will work with an AE on their patch, and then likely two others as well, depending on the segment. But any given point in time, they have at least two AEs that they're working with. And I think that is super important because then there's added incentive for each of those AEs to come weekly to each one-on-one with that SDR and game plan with them on how they're going to help them penetrate their patch. Because if it's just a one-to-one ratio, then there's no incentive for the AE to spend more time with the ADR other than driving better alignment. But we want to world where the AE wants to spend more time with the ADR to make them successful so that they in turn drive more pipeline and make the AE successful.
Todd Busler (29:17):
There's also this interesting thing, kind of a phenomenon that you see when the AE is so involved in the SDR's success and see how hard it is to go break into a key account with the right persona, the right potential buyer. You also see the inbound conversion go up because they appreciate it so much more that they're like, oh, I'm really going to prep for this. I'm really going to do my homework, et cetera. I was going to drill into what you meant by holding AEs accountable, but I love your answer. It's easy to, on a PG end of week wrap up call to say who got their new business meetings? Where events are we driving people to who's behind on the leaderboard? I love the video idea because it's not just saying, here's what we did, but here's also our plan. And naturally you're getting this organic sharing across different parts of the organization and learning from each other. I think that's a super novel idea that I frankly never heard of. You mentioned the shift to the allbound model. Why have you adjusted that model and what are kind of the biggest one or two takeaways in either learnings or things you would've done differently?
Austin Hitchcock (30:16):
I think a lot of companies have struggled with, especially in the early days of the SDR world fighting over credit for marketing source leads or outbound source leads. And at the end of the day, we're an account-based model. We sell each rep internally is tied to an account, not a lead. And so there's so much that you can do as a SDR to drive interest by prospecting, whether it's via email, cold call, et cetera, that then gets the prospect to go to the website, download something or request a demo that you influenced. But it's very hard, as you know, to identify how exactly that was influenced. So there's always inherently some shared ownership over, well, was it the prospecting that then got them to come to the website? Was it the website that then got them to respond to the SDR's email? So being able to track those separately, but from a compensation standpoint, from a cultural philosophical standpoint, we just treat them all one and the same. And I think that just allows us to buy into different programs, drive events more effectively, just run a full ABM motion without any uncomfortability.
Todd Busler (31:39):
Love it. I would bet a lot of money based on the solution that you're selling, that you take enablement very seriously for your team. Can you walk me through some of the learnings to your approach to talent and skill development for your organization?
Austin Hitchcock (31:56):
Yeah, I think there's two different things I like to think about. It's acquisition of talent and then how do you train enable onboard, et cetera.
Todd Busler (32:05):
Upskill.
Austin Hitchcock (32:06):
Upskill, exactly. I'm really passionate about targeting early in career professionals for the SDR role. I've always been of the mindset that sales is inherently a competitive numbers driven job and just based on experience, and this is not always the case, but I have had a lot more success getting people into Highspot as their first ever job and then growing them internally into other areas of the business. Then interviewing externally, people who have experience. We certainly value the self-starter dedicated mindset that enables people to start early in career and kind of grow. And so then that shapes our enablement and training and onboarding as well. So for example, our internship that we run, we have a relationship with a university that's local that runs a sales program. It's kind of like a minor and they have a handful of classes that we come and teach, we'll guest lecture, and then we get to participate in this internship.
(33:18):
Part of that internship is mostly dedicated to just learning about Highspot, it's learning about our customers, our prospects, the space, a lot of classroom style learning, a lot of rehearsal and role play and a little bit of cold calling and a little bit of real prospecting, but that's not the intent. The intent is not to get some ROI from a pipe gen standpoint out of our interns. It's to drive a talent pipeline. And this has been super effective for our onboarding. If we're able to convert those interns to full-time hires, they onboard and get to productivity so much faster than any other cohort of people we've ever hired onto. And so that's been key. It's really effective onboarding. We take a lot of what we do in the internship, replicate that for our full-time hires and vice versa. It's spending a lot of time upfront and investment upfront to make sure that they're committed to the skillset and the company long-term.
(34:09):
And then on the other end, it's building out a talent pipeline of different places within the organization that the reps can grow to. I've always been very hiring people who have other interests outside of just being an AE. And I know that's a little bit controversial, a little bit contradictory to what we're a lot of companies try to do, but it's allowed us to then attract talent that isn't quite sure if they want to be in sales or at least carry a bag long term. So we've got future ams, future managers, future enablement leaders, future rev ops partners, et cetera, and they bring different skill sets and different ways of thinking to then diversify the skillset on the team. And that's been a huge talent unlock for us just building out those different talent pipelines.
Todd Busler (35:02):
Super smart, and I agree with that. Yeah, you're not going to get productivity in a 10 week internship, but you're going to get the select few that you start the next cycle that are already two months ahead of someone you're going to hire off the street. Right. Super smart. Austin, you mentioned AI literacy or usage from account research perspective or filling gaps or even coming up with a hypotheses on how you can help an account. You also mentioned the use of video. Where else are you seeing some gains or productivity outputs when it comes to AI today? I agree with you. I think there's a lot of AI oriented tooling for the s and b seller, right? That's very AI driven, but there's actually not that much or not that much that's being used on the real playing field for the ADR that is like, look, I have 30 accounts I'm trying to break into. So where are you seeing, if at all, some meaningful gains there?
Austin Hitchcock (36:01):
At a team level, we are starting to adopt AI as a way to augment outreach into our lower tier accounts as well as contacts. And so the goal there is to free up our team's bandwidth to be able to spend even more time prospecting their tier one accounts and doing that hyper one-to-one personalization, as I mentioned earlier. And what that looks like really is we've got our tier one accounts that are that white glove experience. They have an account plan, they're highly researched. We've mapped the relationships. We're building out those game plans and talking about those in our PG meetings. It's a full ABM campaign with AE, the SDR, marketing, et cetera. Our lower tier accounts, we are think like using AI to drive smart sequencing a little bit of the SDR, AI SDR concept and enrolling them in these low profile campaigns that once that prospect then engages with us, that is when we're assigning a human to the response and to drive that meeting. So we're hopeful that that's going to drive a lot more efficiency because the conversion rates drop off so dramatically when it comes to your ICP tiers and your contact tiers for that matter within those ICPs. And so if we can augment just a little bit of outreach to low quality MQLs to low quality contacts within accounts we know we want to break into, but we're unlikely to see value and talking to that individual, that will then free up time for everything else.
Todd Busler (37:32):
Do you envision that any kind of email at scale gets centralized to an AI or one person operating a bunch of AI so that your ADRs are exclusively focused on kind of one-to-one highly personalized? Do you see it heading in that direction?
Austin Hitchcock (37:46):
It's hard to say. We're very early stages and we have yet to realize the value from this, if I'm being honest.
Todd Busler (37:52):
Super common. I hear this a lot, everyone, like the allure of it is great, right? The allure is awesome. Great. It's hard to target these people. We at least want to touch 'em. In theory, it's like it's a super low cost awareness play, but everyone's going to start doing that. Does anyone open those emails? Right?
Austin Hitchcock (38:10):
Yeah. I do certainly think that there is a world where it continues to increase noise and then open rates decrease and meetings decrease, et cetera. So no, I don't really have an answer for you. I think it's just we'll wait and see.
Todd Busler (38:24):
Yeah, I'm with you. And I think it's super interesting to see how it plays out because in theory, sure, but does this thing actually work? I don't know. Again, I think if you're selling rippling or ramp and you literally have hundreds of thousands of companies and they're already paying for something, it's very different than selling Highspot or Champify. We have a narrower list of accounts or higher value accounts. So last question I have for you, Austin. There's been a ton of golden insights in this, so I appreciate it and I could tell, look, you've been in the weeds, right? You've experienced a lot of the things people are trying to work through or debate. I get a lot of questions from people that have been in the SDR leadership role three, four or five years, maybe more, that are saying like, Hey, should I stay in this role? Does it eventually have a ceiling? If we think the SDR teams are going down, sure, it's extremely valuable, but it's not the CRO track necessarily. Maybe what's kept you in this role, I'm sure you've had multiple opportunities to say, Hey, I'm going to go be an AE, or I want to lead a commercial team. How do you think about that or what advice for similar people when you have?
Austin Hitchcock (39:31):
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think about that constantly. I've always had this notion of giving away your Legos, which if you're not familiar with it, it's taking on additional responsibility and handing away what you're currently doing to people on your team to be able to free up additional bandwidth to go do more things. So that's just kind of how I've come into the roles that I've come into and gotten to the point where I'm at in my career. Pipeline is a really hot topic like you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, and it touches so much of the go-to market. I actually think it's making SDR leadership more strategic than less, even though we're adding more technology to augment the SDRs and our SDRs becoming extinct, et cetera, et cetera. But what we do is more important than ever, and it's also something that is the best way.
(40:22):
I saw STAT the other day. I think entry level jobs are decreasing across the board. I still think it's the best way to get in on the ground floor and learn a lot about the go to market side of the organization. And so I take that mindset with me in leadership and I learn about what's going on post-sale. I'm sitting in forecast meetings, I'm having conversations with post-sale, pre-sale, where can learning about those other areas of the business help drive pipeline and help what I do today. And so I think that's what keeps me in the job is just it's constantly changing. We're at the forefront of technology, but for other SDR leaders out there, if you're feeling stuck, go figure out what other parts of the go-to-market are struggling with. And I guarantee you it has something to do with prospecting, driving pipeline, objection handling. It all comes down to some of the core skills that SDRs do. And so I've felt like I've always been able to drive unique and important value here because of that.
Todd Busler (41:22):
I love that answer. I never heard that analogy, but the SDR org is the tip of the spear, and you're hearing all the objections. You're the first canary in the coal mine when a competitor's coming up the most, right? So I think that's awesome advice. There's other problems that are adjacent to your specific role and go fix more of them, and you become more and more valuable. Austin, this was epic. For people that want to follow along Austin Hitchcock on LinkedIn, I follow your stuff. You write a lot of really good stuff with also, there's no slant or hidden sales pitch. You're just like, Hey, this is what we're doing. Give Austin a follow. And also, I really appreciate you taking some time.
Austin Hitchcock (42:01):
Todd, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.
Todd Busler (42:04):
Awesome. Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me Todd Busler on LinkedIn and share this episode with a friend that you think will be interested. If you want more resources about building and scaling all things outbound, you can sign up for our newsletter at champify.io/blog.