Sales Development Representative

As a Sales Development Representative (SDR) for Sisu, you will ensure an engaging and addictive experience for customers using our growth automation software platform. Customers will see amazing changes in their life and business as a result of using our solutions, however, it is a change in their business that requires effort to make a reality. That’s where you come in, to help consult, demonstrate and inspire them to use Sisu to make this change.This is what you can expect working at Sisu and many fast growing SaaS, software startups;

- There is a grueling amount of work. You should not expect success in this role without sustained, diligent effort—a level of effort that will surpass that of your peers at other companies.

- We value integrity. We want Sisu to be a vehicle in your personal success and dreams, and we want you to feel fulfilled in the role as you align with our customers and their dreams and goals. We value equality.

- You need to be a self-motivated problem solver. Your success at Sisu will depend directly on your ability to solve complex problems, where the answer is rarely black and white. As you can do so, those that you work with will see you as a thought leader, consultant. They will trust you with their business and referrals. You will need to think outside of the box and work with people’s unique situations as well as working past limitations in our software.

- Given that we are a startup, you have the opportunity to rapidly advance professionally, work HUGE deals and get asked to be part of decisions and discussions with our critical team members. You will operate at a level of learning and opportunity may be much higher than that of your peers of similar experience levels at other companies.

- You want to get the job done from your beach house in California? That’s great. Just bring your A-game (and your laptop), every day. Having your butt in a seat for eight hours each day is not a part of the job description at Sisu (nor will it ever be), it is about outcomes that we each achieve and the value we add for our team, customers, partners and affiliates.

- You won’t be micromanaged, you will be held accountable by your metrics and your peers.

- You will lose customers. Those that are unexpected. Move on and learn.

- You will work closely with senior leadership. Don’t placate. We want your critical, professionally delivered feedback.

- We want you to make smart business decisions. We will trust you to make smart decisions, and when you don’t, we will ask “What did you learn, and what could you have done differently?”

- It is more important for us to find team members that fit into our culture, rather than often the right spots. You may not be in this role in 3 months, 6 months, or a year, but as long as you continue to add value to the team, you are going to be rewarded.

- Your writing skills should be impeccable. 

This is what you can expect from the SDR role specifically:

- Everything in sales starts with pipeline. As an SDR, this is your sole focus day in and day out. You should be obsessed with finding new accounts who are perfect fits for Sisu and turning them into scheduled demos on an Account Executives calendar. You should be obsessed with revenue producing activities and always be weary of anything that is not a revenue producing activity.

- SDRs (and sales people in general) struggle when they are only proficient in capturing demand. You need to be able to create demand as well. These are separate and equally important skills and both will be critical in this role.

- Success in this role looks like like the following: consistently hitting or exceeding quota production goals, becoming an expert on the real estate industry, becoming an expert on the Sisu product, becoming an expert on the challenges a real estate team/brokerage face, earning the trust of the rest of the sales team (particularly the Account Executives—they should be excited when they see that you booked a demo on their calendar), making an impact in the lives of the prospects you work, and promoting into an Outbound Account Executive role.

- You will be provided with all the training and sales tools you need to succeed. However, you need to take ownership of your personal growth and development in this role. Those who have done it before you took that initiative themselves and that initiative is what allowed them to progress in the company.

- The company is trusting you with one of its most precious assets—inbound leads. You should maintain an exceptional business hour speed to lead—which is how we measure speed inside of dedicated business hours. Under 30 seconds is exceptional. Over 5 minutes on average is not acceptable. Studies have shown that seconds matter and the conversion rate of a lead called within 30 seconds vs. 5 minutes is significant. You should constantly be focussing on this metric and communicating with leadership on ideas and processes that can help you succeed in delivering exceptional results here.

- Exceptional organizational and system skills are a must in this role. You will succeed as you coordinate an intelligent sales motion against hundreds of leads and accounts, and organize your time to make sure you’re focussing on the right ones with the right frequency of action. Tools like Salesforce and Outreach will make this possible, so long as you adopt the tools. At Sisu, if it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen. Organized sales reps have a history of success here. Disorganized sales reps often don’t last.

2023 SDR Commission Plan and Terms - Version 1.0
‍
1. Plan term: September 2023 - December 20232. Base salary: The base salary for this role is $40,000/yr. This reflects your full-time, professional commitment to the role, to the team, to this job description, and to going above and beyond that to help the company grow and achieve its goals. 

2. Dedicated to New Business: You will earn commission on New Business resulting from your scheduled demos. This will be a mix of inbound (company generated) leads/accounts and your own outbound (self generated or stale CRM leads) efforts. New Business is defined as leads/accounts who were not already Sisu customers and who start a new subscription plan with the company. 

3. Sourcing Commission: Your commission on each deal is affected by the type of lead/account closed. We put these leads/accounts into three buckets:

- Inbound: this is a lead who fills out a form on our website or is distributed to you via marketing. The base rate for these types of deals is .3x monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

- Stale Outbound: this is a lead who was already in Salesforce, but who was identified as “stale”, meaning anyone in the company can work them. The base rate for these types of deals is .65x MRR. 

- Cold Outbound: this is a lead who was not in Salesforce. You found the lead, put them into Salesforce, and nurtured them to demo yourself. The base rate for these types of deals is 1x MRR.

If a lead exists in Salesforce and was created by another rep, but has little to no activity, you may petition your manager to have it count as a Cold Outbound deal. Two scenarios where this may make sense are 1) the lead exists because of a bulk data import in the past, and has never actually been worked or 2) the lead was sourced by our lead harvesting team as a cold lead and has only been worked lightly by another rep.

3.1. Sourcing Mix: It is vital for your success in this role that you can consistently source your own deals from a variety of sources, and you are always heavily engaged in prospecting.

The goal in this role is that you form the foundation of skills to promote to an Outbound AE role within 6-9 months. As an Outbound AE, you will not receive inbound leads—for that reason, it’s critical that you learn to source your own business and own your pipeline.

You should expect this to be a grueling amount of work. Prospecting is difficult. It is this—your ability to perfect what most salespeople shy away from, and that so few are able to do consistently over time—that makes your contribution in this role so valuable and so rare. 

4. Closing Commission: Commission is calculated based on the MRR of the opportunities you created (opportunities are created when demos are set). You’ll earn accelerators in months where you produced more qualified demos, and those accelerators will apply to all closed/won opportunities in that month.

The monthly accelerators are as follows:

- Below Quota: > 30 held, qualified demos | No accelerator

- Quota: 40-49 held, qualified demos | 20% acceleratorStretch Goal: 50-59 held, qualified demos | 30% accelerator

- Grit Goal: 60+ held, qualified demos | 40% accelerator

The graph below shows you the compensation reflecting from a 500 MRR deal (which is about our average deal size): 

4. Quota and Standard: The expectation is that you will personally schedule 40 held, qualified demos each month. Qualified demos are prospects/accounts who are not Sisu clients and match our ideal customer profile (ICP). While we would love to see you achieve Stretch and Grit goals consistently, you will be considered a great asset to the team as you hit Quota consistently.

Separate from Quota is the Standard for this role. We define Standard as the minimum level of performance the company can tolerate for continued employment.
‍
There are two main standards for SDRs once fully ramped:
‍
1. Demos Scheduled & Held: 30 qualified demos held/month OR within 20% of the top producing SDR in a given month (if you meet either of these, you are meeting standard). If you fall below this standard in any given month, you will be put on notice. If you fall below this standard in consecutive months, you will be let go.

2. Speed to Lead: A sub 5-minute Business-Hour Speed to Call (BHS2C) on leads/accounts distributed to you by the marketing team. With leads being a vital resource to the company, this is monitored weekly. If you fall under this standard in a given week, you will be put on notice. If you fall below this standard in consecutive weeks, you will be let go.

a. You may request to be taken off of lead flow to accommodate your schedule, but if you are on lead flow, you are expected to take special care of the leads you are given.

b. Special exceptions will be made if there is an exceptional lead flow at a given period of time, i.e. 100 leads suddenly sign up for a webinar within 5 minutes of each other—however, it is your responsibility to stay on top of this and proactively point it out to leadership.
‍
c. Business Hour Speed to Call starts counting from the time you receive the lead, but it only counts during SDR team business hours.
‍
i. If you received a lead at 10:00 AM during business hours, and called it at 10:02 AM during business hours, your BHS2C would be 2 minutes.

ii. If you received a lead at 2:00 AM (outside of business hours) and called it at 9:05 AM the next day, your BHS2C would be 5 minutes.

iii. If you call a lead outside of business hours, your BHS2C will be logged as 1 second. 

5. Quota Relief: At a lot of companies, unlimited paid time off is lackluster. It’s just a way to get employees to take less. That’s why, at Sisu, in addition to Unlimited Paid Time Off, we set the expectation that you should take at least 15 days each year and still be able to reach your goals. We back up this expectation with our Quota Relief Policy. If you take a day off, you can focus on recharging that day without stressing about missing your number. You’ll receive credit towards your quota based on your average daily production over the last 3 months, for up to 5 days each month and 15 total days throughout the year. You cannot request and receive quota relief in the same month. In such scenarios, the relief would be applied the following month.

5.1 Ramping: Ramping is a period where team members are learning and are not subject to carry a full quota/standard for production for a short period of time. During ramping, you are not expected to carry a full quota. It’s a time to learn the ropes. The best way to take advantage of ramping, however, is to act like it’s not there.

You’ll ramp through your first 3 full months with the company. So, for example, if your start date is September 15, Month 1 would be October and Month 4 (where you’ll be expected to carry a full quota) would be February.

Team members who go on parental leave or any other approved leave from the company will have two full months of ramping upon their return, and will be paid on any invoices during that period (and during their leave itself) as if they had hit quota in that month.

All deals that you close during ramping will be paid at Quota commission rates (unless, of course, you achieve a higher level in that month)—so take advantage of ramping and close some deals!

6. Performance measurement and commission payment timing: Performance to Quota will be evaluated on the 20th of the following month. This allows our clients to add users and upgrade plans, which will positively affect your performance percentage to plan. It will also ensure that any accounts that do not last at least 20 days in an “active” state are not counted towards plan attainment. Commission payments will be paid following the receipt of payment from the customer and only upon the approval of the VP of Revenue. Commission payments will be made two payroll cycles after the close of the month. So, for example, September performance would be evaluated on October 20, and September commissions would be paid on November 5. For tax purposes you may request or the CFO may recommend that the commission payment is paid as a separate payment, still during the regular payroll cycle.

7. Commission reporting: You and the VP of Revenue will have access to reporting to view and determine your assigned monthly total sales and commission accrued and paid.

8. Separation: In the event of separation/termination of employment from Sisu, commission payments will continue to be the financial obligation of Sisu for a period of 90 days after your date of separation.

9. Plan subject to change: Plans described herein are subject to change.
‍