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Trying to force your mid-market BDR playbook into enterprise deals? That's why you're failing.
In this episode, Toni and Raul tackle the common misconceptions about enterprise BDR motions. They explain why activity metrics don't matter anymore, why your junior SDRs are struggling, and how the AE-BDR relationship fundamentally changes at the enterprise level.
Learn why enterprise BDRs need to think like strategic account managers, not cold callers, and why understanding the "Game of Thrones" approach to stakeholder mapping is crucial for breaking into large accounts.
Creators and Guests
What is Revenue Brothers?
What happens when a VC and a CEO come together?
– They nerd out about all things revenue. And they don’t always agree.
Raul Porojan of Project A Ventures and Toni Hohlbein of Growblocks are the Super Revenue Brothers. In every episode they dissect and debate current issues in B2B SaaS, and offer solutions on how to solve them
No matter if you’re an early-stage startup or a scaling unicorn – you’ll always learn something new.
RevBros - Why Your Enterprise BDR Motion Sucks
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Introduction and Setting the StageIntroduction
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[00:00:00]
Raul: it can take a lot of work to shake enough hands to understand enough to read about enough about the industry to know who to call, to know who to speak to, when to kind of keep all these balls afloat.
Having all these moving parts of the Game of Thrones strategic puzzle game. that is what the BDR can help a lot with, like putting in the legwork, shaking the hands, talking to the people, just sending Messages, sending, roses, whatever to people,
Toni: So Raul, you have a nice haircut today.
Raul: Thank you very much. Someone notices it has to you, Toni why I have you in my life.
Toni: Yeah, there you go. Unfortunately, we're not on YouTube yet. If you really want to see us, then, you know, ping us obviously. But, otherwise it's only me being able to enjoy that side.
The Role of BDRs in Enterprise
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Toni: but before we go too deep into that topic, Raul, what is it we want to chat about today?
Raul: So we actually are talking a little bit more about like kind of how to set up different orgs and org building in general. We think that this is a lot very interesting to us, but also on a lot of people's minds right now. And we want to talk about one specific area of org building, which is [00:01:00] in the enterprise motion, BDR, kind of like org building, do's and don'ts, what should you do there?
And what's kind of the state of the art in 2025?
Toni: And the reason why we're talking about this. it's really, Raul and I were doing a couple of advisory and consulting gigs on the side and this literally popped up for me actually the other week. And really the challenge that I'm seeing is what is really well known and really well understood is this.
Mid-market, high volume BDR motion, right? you see this on LinkedIn all the time. Everyone tells you about this and how you automate everything and you know, five years ago was how many meetings an SDR should be booking and there's lots of information about that stuff.
But I think where there's a real gap in the market, and sadly some founders, some folks don't understand the difference actually. you know, how do you need to adjust that whole setup, that whole high volume setup when you're suddenly targeting enterprise buyers, right. Or enterprises in that sense. and we just wanted to clean this up.
We're going to kind of fill [00:02:00] this gap a little bit for you guys out there. maybe you have someone to send this to that kind of needs to hear about this, but that was actually the purpose for talking about, how do you build an enterprise BDR motion?
Raul: we should start with the question. Should you do BDR motions in enterprise at all? Because the classic obviously would be, or one of the classics is kind of this all in one person account manager approach to we have one or one person just taking care of like whatever, Siemens or MediaMarkt as a customer or five of them.
how does a BDR even play in there? What's the, what's the benefit of that? Hm.
Toni: Yeah. So I think, and I'm mainly schooled in the mid market motion, right. But at least my learnings and the way I'm trying to dissect this problem a little bit is the top end of the funnel is still a lot of work.
BDR vs AE: Roles and Responsibilities
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Toni: Let's just, let's just be really clear about this, whether this is mid market or enterprise, and I think in both cases, AEs suffer from context switching.
I kind of, in the one hand side, you have a [00:03:00] closing meeting and you're preparing the red lines and you're working on the infosec thing, and you have a really important question for your product team And then you're supposed to go back to your laptop and do some LinkedIn sales navigator stuff, right?
Kind of, it's difficult to do this content switching. and I think it's also difficult to, you know, be a manager for people that basically kind of have two jobs at the same time. I think that's difficult. That doesn't rule it out though. so especially in a, you know, single AE setup and a full cycle AE setup, You know, what, what I've seen work extremely well is, you know, people with just the Rolodex already there, right? Kind of you, you hire someone from Snowflake, and you're Databricks or you're Snowflake and you hire someone from Databricks, like they, they know whom to call. They know, they know Oliver in, in MediaMarkt and they know Jessica in, you know, Siemens.
and they have those connections already built and especially in enterprise motion. That can work out extremely well, right? But not always do you have that plug and play perfect [00:04:00] fit of an enterprise guy just coming in then closing a couple of millions for you. And I think in those cases, we need to kick in some doors from, you know, from a new basically, then getting some help to achieve that.
I think that sounds like at least like a good idea.
Raul: a different way of putting what you just said is the benefit of having a BDR, SDR, whatever you want to call them in an enterprise motion can just be a different thing than from having it in a, mid market motion. in a mid market high volume motion, you might want to look at, let's just push through a lot of leads there.
Let's book demos and maybe some of them are not SAL qualified and we have to get them out. But other than that, Book demos as many as possible and get a high volume going and just sign those customers hand them over to an account executive To some extent, this is not really the case in, enterprise or however you want to call it.
Effective Stakeholder Management
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Raul: because they're, to me at least, the biggest kind of term that people have to get used to more and more in enterprise is stakeholder management or stakeholder understanding, stakeholder mapping, which is much [00:05:00] more than just the people in a company, by the way. It's also about budgets. It's about projects ongoing.
It's about departments. It's about a lot of different things. One of the roles of a BDR, yes, it is talking to people and yes, it is setting appointments, but it is done, like the kind of material that they do that with and the qualification, the knowledge that they come out with has a different value.
learning that. At your MediaMarkt customer, currently they're having an initiative doing the thing that you're kind of doing, or they're spending money on AI or whatever, and then getting to the right people with the right budgets within that organization can be a 10 step process. Which a BDR can go quite a long way there to just asking their way into the right person understanding who's doing what right now, understanding that McKinsey is in there right now and doing a project, all these things that you might call legwork that really built the foundation of the knowledge that you can take to then sell that account.
If you take a full time or four full cycles, a full cycle, AE, that just might not be possible for them. Like it's a [00:06:00] bit too much work to figure out all these things and to talk to Sarah in accounting and, and Toni and buying, and Raul was like the head of department, whatever. It's a bit too much work.
And so it goes beyond just the setting of the appointment. Now what happens is that a BDR in that kind of motion typically spends a lot more time on one account. So, so obviously they can handle a bit more than one, but they just spend a lot of time on one account and that's fine. and they're not just cold calling 50, 60 accounts a day.
Toni: and then I think those are some of the things that people, when they try and transition like in their heads, a mid market motion to enterprise motion kind of get wrong with a kind of stumbling over, right? Suddenly leading indicator for an SDI isn't activity anymore. Suddenly it's something completely different.
I mean, this also goes hand in hand with. Well, you also don't have so many enterprise accounts, like they're just not so many where you can call them once and then, okay, it didn't work out, burn, you know, call the next one that, you know, that doesn't work out. And I also think the profile of an SDR changes.
Like you will have a [00:07:00] different kind of profile of an SDR or BDR that is doing this kind of work, right? It probably is someone a little bit more experienced, not maybe immediately out of school, someone that the AE is also comfortable with, right? that's the other thing. What I often see is that there's some kind of a pairing or kind of a relationship that's being set between the SDR, BDR and the account executive that, actually work together, right?
So maybe the AE has a territory or has a book of business. And that book of business is being attacked by, the A and the BDI at the same time. Right. So there's a lots of trust, lots of relationship, lots of overlap in the work that they do. but that's necessary in order to break into these accounts.
Right. And some of the information and the knowledge about an account is not, it doesn't make sense to write this into CRM. Right. It doesn't make, just read the notes BDR. And then, then no, it's kind of, there's a conversation. Right. And it's, it's a similar setup. It's a similar kind of way of thinking when you have.
One of your top, customers, right? And you have an account manager [00:08:00] on those top customers, like they think about how can we build this account and how can we get from 50K ACV, currently to a million, what are the steps we need to take? Whom do we need to activate in the organization? That kind of thinking, this kind of account mapping, this account planning.
That kind of happens before you sign the customer in the enterprise too, right? and that just requires a different relationship of working together and therefore I also think it requires a different caliber of BDR in order to even get this off the ground, right? So did you see folks struggle with, having a, maybe two junior, not the right, you know, not the right profile of a BDR trying to be squeezed into this role.
Raul: absolutely. and I have a name for this. I've adopted it from a company I work with, the CRO there, our co founder calls it, the game of thrones that you have to do, meaning the strategic aspects of understanding, not just obviously the mapping within an account, but also the whole industry in itself, because typically when I work in enterprise and let's say you want to, You're building [00:09:00] a food thing and you want to have the producer, but also the retailer at the same time.
But then also kind of like the, whatever wholesale, intermediate in between, it can be that to get one sale across, it can be that you need to kind of work across three, four different levels. And maybe there's even, as I said, a consultancy in there, or maybe they work in some kind of associations, that, that kind of influence each other.
Which is the case, by the way, a lot in Europe and especially in Germany and there it can be very complex and it can take a lot of work to shake enough hands to understand enough to read about enough about the industry to know who to call, to know who to speak to, when to kind of keep all these balls afloat.
And, that is a lot of work for an AE. But a lot of legwork can also be taken over by a BDR. So I would say in a summary of an AE and the BDR, maybe even with the founder, very early stage, importantly, kind of having like all these moving parts of the Game of Thrones strategic puzzle game. that is what the BDR can help a [00:10:00] lot with, like putting in the legwork, shaking the hands, talking to the people, just sending Messages, sending, roses, whatever to people, like, just keeping up to date with things.
how'd that event go, Toni, by the way? the association thing, what did they say? Are they gonna change, like, the thing or whatever? I find that this is, obviously, when it comes to the level, Maybe not possible for the BDR to do on their own, because it does maybe take a lot of strategic understanding to, but as a team, the BDR can do their piece, especially when they're maybe not as experienced as a founder most usually to bring the knowledge and the intel on the ground.
Toni: So everyone is going to be like, okay, cool. Actually, this makes a ton of sense. Thank you very much, Raul and Toni. I'm going to go and implement this thing now. And then the next thing that they're being hit with is like, Oh, okay. Wait a minute. How do I incentivize that person? what are the goals they need to hit, what's the process look like?
When do they hand something over and so forth? Let's go through some of this nitty gritty stuff, because that is immediately the next step after where I see people slide off and be like, okay, you know what, [00:11:00] actually we didn't figure this enterprise thing out, fully here.
So let's start with the hottest of the topics here.
Compensation Strategies for BDRs
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Toni: how do you compensate that enterprise BDR?
Raul: So this is a difficult one. And I wouldn't say that I've seen only one thing work. It is quite contextual, but maybe there is a common thread, which is that it is still BDR work on. And there's still like specific outcomes that someone along the value chain takes and then works towards something right.
So two things that I've seen work is either still breaking kind of like the Deliverable down. And typically this is some kind of meeting after all, but maybe that meeting needs to be qualified in a different way. Or maybe in that meeting there needs to be a lot more people than just one dude you spoke to on the phone.
and maybe it takes a bit longer time, but it is still a meeting Right. So it can still be incentivized on that. and it usually is kind of a handover approach and you can even I mean, you will always have a much deeper understanding in an enterprise motion anyways, kind of have an SAL in there where it's like even a check in between, and the [00:12:00] account executive can be like, this is a good lead or not, right?
So I think that this is kind of similar. What I do see that's maybe, or similar to kind of more mid market motions, but I do see that's maybe a bit more different is that I see more and more BDRs in this kind of area being paid also for the outcome of the entire thing. So kind of as a team and more like a tag team between AE and BDR and if we make this work, then me as BDR, I get like 20 percent of the pie and Toni you get 80 percent if you close them and we're both kind of happy.
so more kind of like a team account team approach, which to me seems Very sensible because there's also so much work done with one account and it can take like six months, 12 months. this is not just a quick call and then hand it over. It's a lot of work from one side and you want to keep people engaged throughout the whole thing.
Toni: So the obvious issue here is that you. especially for more junior folks and whatever enterprise BDR probably going to be still on the junior side compared to an enterprise AE. you ideally want to have, [00:13:00] input and an outcome. You want to connect those two things as much as possible for motivational reasons.
Not like, Oh, I booked a meeting and then I get a commission. Right. I think this is really difficult to really make work in this kind of setup. because if you only do it on the meeting booked, what I've seen is usually you kind of get paid for a meeting booked on a new account.
but actually this BDR might need to book 10 meetings on the same account. So do you then want to pay 10 times for, for kind of that thing where they're kind of, you know, rightly so on doing the correct thing to, you know, enter the organization on the one end and then having this conversation then, actually, wait a minute, we actually need to go over there and, you know, basically building this thing out.
You know, if you then incentivize them on meeting book, that's kind of odd. Right. and then on the other side, like, Hey, you know, you can't just, you know, open a new account, a new meeting, a new opportunity all the time with those deals, because you only have so many and, you know, being on the surface is difficult, but then the flip side is like, okay, I only get paid in six to nine months down the line when the [00:14:00] deal actually closes, because it is an enterprise cycle.
And what I've seen work out the best is, you know, I would actually go with the, like this is a team now, AE and SDR should be compensated on the exact same things. and maybe even on, you know, Hey, this was an inbounds, but the SDR still helped me kind of kick in the doors. We only had one champion that we found in BDR helped me find the other champions and so forth.
Like there can even be, things like that where we're on the enterprise set up, it can be a bit more.
Handover Process: BDR to AE
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Toni: softer on, making the differentiation and, giving those commissions, the next thing is, BDR now booked a meeting with a net new account, maybe, should the BDR do the disco call or the initial call kind of where should the BDR stop?
And where should the AE start? Basically kind of what's your, rule of thumb here.
Raul: So, this goes also to the point before. I do think that it's not necessarily about a meeting, but it's more about getting them to a one stage, the next stage in the process. And every company is a little bit different there. In some, it can be that you, to get to the next stage, [00:15:00] you need to talk to three different departments and you need to get the buyer and you need to whatever.
And in others, it can be just a meeting, but I would really incentivize people to get there. And when it comes to how do you hand that over, the more upmarket you are, the more it's probably good to keep the BDR engaged a bit longer because for different reasons, not just being the face to the customer, because that can change over time,
Connect threads together because, so the less happened before the handover, the less hurt you have, when you hand it over and the less kind of, you need to hold hands with the AE after. Meaning if all I had to do was one quick cold call and someone just said, awesome, let's do it. And as a BDR, and then I hand that lead over to Toni, I probably don't need to do like a briefing meeting with Toni and be in that meeting and whatever.
I can just probably. Put like a quick memo in the, in the Salesforce or whatever. And he'll know what to do. Now, on the contrary, if I had to run after 12 different people and go shake hands at events and go to speak to the association thing, [00:16:00] get their approval, get the meeting with two people, different people, and then another one was seven and then finally get you on board as an AE, it probably makes a lot of sense for me as I've done a month or two of work before to be in that meeting.
So it's, the more that happened before, I find that a rule of thumb is the more debate BDR should also be a little bit involved as the sale goes through.
Toni: Yeah. I would add to this actually that.it depends on the seniority level of the BDR and like maybe after a while working together, you can outsource this a little bit, but as an AE, I wouldn't be stingy on which calls to join. I would actually recommend to join all of them as much as possible.
if it's not a cold call, if it's actually a meeting, maybe with a potential champion, the AE should be on this call. and maybe there's a bit of a handoff, or maybe there's a team tagging. Maybe it's stuff like this, but ultimately from that point onwards, you need to do, well, what's the pain here and who has the pain?
And let's map this out and it's, you know, figure a couple of things out that might be more in the AE skillset arena than they are maybe in the [00:17:00] BDR arena. Right. And even after this call, let's just say it doesn't go anywhere. You as a team will have found out more information that now the BDR can go off on and, you know, keep working into the account potentially.
Right. So I just kind of had like one experience where someone was like, no, the BDR does the discovery, does the first meeting and then hands it off to the AE. And I think that's just really poor. I think that's not a good way to do it. that's why I wanted to bring it in here, but, that was the, you know, how do you incentivize and then how do you do the process?
one important thing, just to kind of make it super clear, the BDR should not report to the AE, that should not be the case. people stumble over this and don't think about it, but what happens is the BDR reports to the AE. you end up having like an assistant relationship, like there's already a little bit of a personal assistant relationship there, right?
Because you're kind of pairing and they're handing off tasks to you. But especially when as a reporting relationship, and kind of the A is your boss, I think this intensifies and then usually ends up being a shitty job [00:18:00] actually for the BDR. So, keep those reporting lines apart, for, for this reason, but also the other reasons like, Hey, the AE should be busy, closing those deals.
And not managing, you know, people managing basically,
Raul: And who says that the AE is a good people manager. So it's not that you hire an AE to be a closer and maybe you, let's say you've done a great job at finding the right person. That doesn't mean that they're the right person to coach, help, that BDR or whatever. And I think you've set an important point there because I have seen in real life many times that this kind of just happens naturally that the AE feels, maybe it's entitlement, maybe it is kind of like a natural inclination.
Like they are de facto the leader of that person, even if hierarchically they're not, and also in the daily it plays out like that. So I do think it's quite important to keep an eye on that and to make sure that the BDR still has like a manager who is supposed to be a manager leader. sometimes it means that maybe the E will not be happy [00:19:00] because I think for a lot of them sometimes it's also the next step and it's kind of the aspirational thing where it's like, yeah, sure.
I'm the leader of this person and they also sell it like that. And the BDR is kind of like just helplessly sitting there since there are 20 hours a week just talking to the anyways, they're kind of just assuming that, it's kind of, you have to be a little bit careful of that. Especially as I said, a minute ago, if the AE is not vetted to be a great leader, right.
It can really fuck up your, your team and the mood and all that. so there are still different people.
Toni: And I think then the last thing is like, if you have the setup, which you could say, like, it's fairly rich, right. To have a, you know, a part of two people running this thing, really depends on the ACVs, by the way, if you, if you do a million dollar deals and you make three of them a year, then it's like, fine, no problem.
but I think what you can also consider here iswhich is actually something I would recommend have the AE also own, customers after they're closed. and this really goes to, I think I've never kind of said it specifically like this, but, I think you're, [00:20:00] you're. way of thinking is absolutely right.
It's like the more happened before this time, the more you lose when you hand it over. Right. and you said it well, if it was a cold call between a BDR and the AE, like not much happened, so, you know, why does there need to be a handover? If you think about how much happened in an enterprise sales process, over six, nine, sometimes 12 months.
Like if you now need to hand all of that over to another person, and only some of that you can, because the relationship is built between you and, you know, the customer, not, it's not just knowledge is also kind of relationship that has been built up, which you simply cannot hand over, then, you know, thinking about it like this makes you realize, oh, well, we're, we're actually shredding a lot of work in half by kind of trying to kind of hand this over, right.
And especially in enterprise motion. you know, if you have this setup, you can then also afford that the AE is not only hunting new logos, but actually continues to nurture and build out existing logos as well. I'm not sure kind of what your experience with this is actually Raul.
Raul: To be very concrete with this, [00:21:00] because I know. Specifically, I have founders in mind right now, but I know that there will be some people listening to this who will be like, yeah, Toni, but that's just because you're not good enough at doing this. And my AI will take care of that is my eyes going to analyze the CRM for the last six months is going to summarize everything perfectly.
Once you close that deal as an AE, everything will be laid out for the customer success person and they will know exactly what to do. And I call absolute BS on that. Not that the AI can't do that, although that's a different challenge, but What I find to be the most important thing really is not having to tell the customer success person what happened.
Maybe this can be done by AI, maybe not, but it is assuring the customer who now has spent six months building trust in you, that you can do the thing that you're, you told them you can solve that problem, build that connection to that tool, deliver that ROI. You have to translate that trust.
to now a new main person that they will have to have that in. And that doesn't include just the trust in the [00:22:00] tool or the program software that you're selling, but also in the person of following up, being reliable, being good to talk to, understanding their problems and all that stuff. And so the translation of trust that you've built within those six months, and it doesn't have to be necessarily, everyone talks about like personal relationship, but it means if they buy from you, In 19 percent of cases, they also buy because they trust your word, they trust that you deliver on what you promised, and that's a personal thing.
And now you have to, as an AE, translate that to someone new. And that, I find, is the main work you have to do when you connect kind of your threat, which is the sale, to the new threat of the customer success person. And you do that by being present, updating the CS person.
You do that by being in the meeting and then telling them, Hey, look, Toni. Make sure you take it a bit slower on that. She doesn't like this. whatever thing that happened in the meeting or just translating between people talking to the customer, like, Hey, this is what he meant actually. And kind of guiding that meeting, you do that a couple of times.
And after that, obviously a capable CS [00:23:00] person can run on their own, but this is a common threat to me, and this is why this is important in enterprise.
Final Thoughts
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Toni: Absolutely. So we're kind of leaving a little bit of the BDR realm, but again, right. Kind of, this actually makes this hunter and farmer relationship even easier to, to, I think, manage actually. We wanted to kind of do a quick episode here, 20, 25 minutes to kind of give you a bit of the lay of the land, how to do this stuff with a BDR enterprise team.
Did you have like any last advice on this topic that we forgot to tick off?
Raul: No, talk to us. If you want to know more, Toni and me, we like to work with ventures and we're actually actively looking to work with ventures as well. So, reach out if you have this problem,
Toni: Raul, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone else for listening. Hit subscribe and send this stuff to people that you think need this. And otherwise, have a great day. Bye bye.
Raul: Bye bye